Architecture in the Age of Pandemics: From Tuberculosis to COVID-19,

Beatriz Colomina

Architecture and medicine have always been closely associated. Theories about the body and the brain are prevalent in architectural discourse, turning architects into doctors and clients into patients. Each era has its own distinctive afflictions, each of which requires its own architecture. The years of bacterial diseases such as tuberculosis therefore led to modern architecture, white buildings detached from the “wet ground where illness incubates”, in the words of Le Corbusier. The discovery of streptomycin brought this period to an end. During the post-war years, attention shifted to psychological issues. Architects ceased to be seen as doctors to be viewed as psychiatrists as well, and houses not only represented medical devices for preventing illness, but also provided psychological comfort and “nervous health”. The 21st century has ushered in an era of neurological disorders, including depression, ADHD, borderline personality disorders, occupational burnout syndrome and allergies (affecting those who are “environmentally hypersensitive” and unable to live in today’s world). But pandemics are back with COVID-19, a virus completely reshaping architecture and urban planning, with the disease once again revealing structural inequalities of race, class and gender.

Beatriz Colomina is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of Architectural History at Princeton University’s School of Architecture and director of the interdisciplinary Media and Modernity programme and the School of Architecture’s PhD programme. Born in Madrid, Colomina studied architecture at the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura in Barcelona, where she also completed her PhD. 

Colomina has written, curated and taught extensively on issues of architecture, art, technology, sexuality and media, and her writings have been translated into over 25 languages. Her books include: X-Ray Architecture (Lars Muller, 2019; Spanish edition Puente, 2021), Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press, 2022), Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (Lars Muller, 2016), Das Andere/The Other: A Journal for the Introduction of Western Culture into Austria (Lars Muller, 2016), The Century of the Bed (2015), Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies (Sternberg Press, 2014); Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X (ACTAR, 2010), La Domesticidad en Guerra/Domesticity at War (ACTAR 2006 / MIT 2007), Doble exposición: arquitectura a través del arte (AKAL, 2006), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (MIT, 1994) and Sexuality and Space (1992).

Her exhibitions include Clip/Stamp/Fold (2006-2013), Playboy Architecture (2012-2016), Radical Pedagogies (2014-2015), Liquid La Habana (2018), The 24/7 Bed (2018) and Sick Architecture (2022). In 2016, she curated the third Istanbul Design Biennial with Mark Wigley. In 2018, she received an honorary doctorate from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and in 2020 she was awarded the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize for her contributions to the field of architecture. She recently curated the exhibition We the Bacteria: Notes Toward a Biotic Architecture with Mark Wigley for the Triennale di Milano 2025, as well as the major installation The Other Side of the Hill at the Arsenale for the 2025 Venice Biennale, in collaboration with Mark Wigley, Patricia Urquiola and the scientists Roberto Kolter and Geoffrey West.