SDC Lecture Beatriz Colomina | Sick Architecture

About the event

The School of Design + Construction Lecture Committee is privileged to invite you to “Sick Architecture: From TB to COVID 19,” a virtual lecture by Dr. Beatriz Colomina.

“All architecture is sick,” According to Dr. Colomina. “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 is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture at Princeton University. She writes and curates on questions of design, art, sexuality and media. Her books include Sexuality and Space (1992), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1994), Domesticity at War (2007), Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies (2014), Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X–197X (2010) and Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (2016). 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. Her latest book is X-Ray Architecture (2019).

Registration is required; sign up for the lecture through the link above or below:
https://wsu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wCaSht7xRQ2uCO9z_39VZg