SICK ARCHITECTURE

A thought-provoking essay collection about how architecture and sickness are surprisingly interwoven—from Ancient Greece to present-day New York City.

Illnesses, wellness, and architecture are inseparable. Medical professionals and architects have always been in a kind of dance, often influencing one another, though the dance is not always synchronized. Drawing from a wide range of historical and contemporary case studies from ancient Greece to twentieth-century India to present-day New York City, Sick Architecture highlights a topic that has shaped our lives from the very beginnings of architecture to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond.

Sick Architecture goes beyond the sicknesses recognized by the medical profession to ask: What aspects of society may be ill, in need of care, or subject to pathologization? Similarly the book goes beyond physical buildings and cities to interrogate architecture’s policy protocols and spatial logics. Its thirty-five diverse essays explore moments in global history when shifting notions of health became vectors for the development of architectural practice and discourse—as well as the reverse, when architecture acted as a reservoir and vector for illness.

Beatriz Colomina is Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture at Princeton University and the author of X-Ray Architecture and other books.