Michael Obrist in conversation with Beatriz Colomina about Sick Architecture

Sick Architecture
All architecture is sick. There is no disease without architecture, and no architecture without disease. As doctor Benjamin Ward Richardson put it when introducing Our Homes and How to Make them Healthy, a compendium of texts by doctors and architects for the 1884 International Health Exhibition in London: “Man, in constructing protection from exposure has constructed the conditions for disease.” Doctors and architects have always been in a kind of dance, often exchanging roles, collaborating, influencing each other, even if not always synchronized. Furniture, rooms, buildings, cities and networks are produced by medical emergencies that layer one on top of another over the centuries. We tend to forget very quickly what produce these layers. We act as if each pandemic is the first, as if trying to bury the pain and uncertainty of the past.

Beatriz Colomina
Beatriz Colomina is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture in Princeton University School of Architecture and was a 2018–2019 fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She has written extensively on questions of architecture, art, sexuality and media. She has curated a number of exhibitions including Clip/Stamp/Fold (2006), Playboy Architecture (2012) and Radical Pedagogies (2014). In 2016, she was co-curator of the third Istanbul Design Biennial.