Lecture by Beatriz Colomina
The renowned architectural historian and theorist Beatriz Colomina will present her new book X-Ray Architecture (Lars Müller Publishers, 2019) that explores the enormous impact of medical discourse and imaging technologies on the formation, representation and reception of twentieth-century architecture. By proposing that modern architecture was shaped by the dominant medical obsession of its time: tuberculosis and its primary diagnostic tool, the X-ray, Beatriz Colomina suggests that if we want to talk about the state of architecture today, we should look to the dominant obsessions with illness and the latest techniques of imaging the body—and ask what effects they have on the way we conceive architecture.
Beatriz Colomina is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture in Princeton University School of Architecture and 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. Beatriz Colomina is member of the advisory board of ARCH+.