BC: Yes, while for some architects, architecture is a kind of drug, for others, like Alvar Alto, architecture is a kind of medical equipment. He talks about architecture from a medical perspective. The whole question of rethinking what sickness is, can be found in Aalto’s statement when he says that architects always design for the vertical person, but here you have a client, the TB patient, that is constantly on the horizontal and therefore the architecture has to change. The vertical man goes back to the manuals of architecture that are always centered around the athletic healthy male figure, from Leonardo Da Vinci, to the Modulor of Le Corbusier. We are always designing for the able, white, exercised, body, but Aalto already said that architects should always „design for the person in the weakest position“. And the reality is that we spent significant parts of our lives in the weakest position, as a baby, when you are old, or you have a broken leg, or when you're pregnant or ill… So this myth that at the center of architecture there is this athletic, male, white, body, excludes most of the population. But in an architecture of disability we should design for those in the weakest position.
DP: In a way this project could be framed as a form of curatorial research, questioning the healthy body as a condition for modern architecture. How is this questioning of the normal reflected in the exhibition design?
BC: The exhibition itself is a form of research, as we were saying, it is an archive that exists in multiple media. It is shown here at CIVA in this beautiful installation by OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, but also in the series e-flux articles, podcasts and ongoing events.
The visitor, whether at CIVA or online, is basically not looking at an object on the wall or the screen, but somehow at the world itself, immersed in a kaleidoscopic array of symptoms of the entanglement of architecture and sickness. The contributions go back and forth in time, place and scale that forces the visitor to make their own connections. There is no particular sequence.
NH: So in that sense, there are no explicit chapters, no hierarchies, no didactics.
BC: No prescribed path or prescribed reading neither. It's more like an exploration of an almost overwhelming array of different juxtaposed thoughts.
NH: Crucial are the parameters of the exhibition design developed by OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen. When usually doing an exhibition, you have the normative sight line at 1,50m, where you center things. But 1,50m is of course for standing person, not for people in wheelchairs, not for children.
BC: It is usually for men that are taller than most of the rest of us.
NH: What we developed is 20cm below this. So every video screen is centered much lower. This has an incredibly interesting effect on the space: The folded Plexiglas structure feels very low, hence the surrounding CIVA space much bigger. And it's very generous because this kind of folded Plexiglas structure is relatively low.
BC: In terms of content, there are several panels dealing with the question of architecture and disabilities. We have research by David Gissen, who has worked extensively with a team on the connection between architecture and the spectrum of capacities of human bodies.13 Then the research of Ignacio González Galán on Berkeley in the 60’s and the Center for Independent Living, where physical accessibility was introduced as a topic of architectural education. This came out of heated political debates, protests and strikes that were taking place on campus at the time, starting with the Free Speech movement in 1964. The ambition to give equal access to diversely abled bodies led some faculty and the students from the School of Architecture to collaborations in creating the conditions for an accessible campus. Policy changes that followed these events, eventually turned into the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
NH: Disability architecture today is shown in a new, so far unpublished project by 51N4E in Brussels, which tries to „normalize“ disability. So today architects develop spatial strategies to weave together the everyday lives of different (dis)abitlies and try to renegotiate thresholds, stairs, etc., building on the history of the Center of Independent Living.
BC: I think these questions are sometimes also biographical. Architects get to reflect upon the fact that they themselves are part of an expanded spectrum of abilities or even suffering disability and learning from that disability. Alvar Aalto, for example, had been sick at the time of the commission of Paimio and claimed that having to stay in bed for such a long time, changed his understanding of architecture. As we said earlier, Neutra is another example. If you scratch a bit the surface, all of them either had tuberculosis or had very close friends and relatives who suffered from it. So you cannot think about modern architecture without thinking about TB. But for me, Aalto is a very special case, because he's effectively making sickness normal. Different degrees of sickness define the human condition. There’s no such a thing as the perfect healthy human body. That is such an anomaly, that exists – if at all – only for a short period of time.
DP: As you point out, it is very often related to biographical situations, which make designers reflect upon the relation of health and architecture. One could say that also COVID has written itself into our biographies with various degrees of tragedy. To what extend do you think architects are already able to reflect this today?
NH: When one mentions COVID-19 in the cultural sphere today, there is an obvious sense of oblivion. Everybody wanted to get back to normal – as if disease wasn’t normal. Our exhibition argues that the regime of Sick Architecture will not be over in a few months. Sickness has always been part of humankind. This is the thesis: Accept disease as the norm, and understand all these different, often contradictory aspects as part of the challenge for today's architects. That’s why we also show examples of today, like architecture from 51N4E with their Huis aan 't laar project as a laboratory for health care architecture, or De Vilder Vinck Architects with their Caritas psychiatric centre. I think what's interesting today is that many architects are seeing these topics as a source of innovation, and this is new – at least for the past 30 years.
BC: Yes, new and not new at the same time, because the generation of Le Corbusier, Neutra and Aalto was already concerned with that.
NH: It was a forgotten heritage, because after the heroic modernism and the anti-institutional experiments in the 70’s there was a kind of amnesia in our discipline. From the 80’s to the early 2000’s the least thing that architects were concerned about were hospitals and psychiatries. They were interested in museums to rise their cultural capital and hence architectural profile. I see these medical topics coming back to the architectural innovation, for instance with the striking example that we’re showing with the Maggie’s Centres.
BC: Maggies’s Centers is a project by Charles Jenck’s wife Maggie. After she was diagnosed with breast cancer, the first thing they realized was that the places where they had to spend time were horrible. Waiting in long corridors with no windows after you had just been diagnosed, for example, and they realized that the architecture was contributing to their feeling sick... Actually that kind of architecture is sick architecture. The Maggie's Cancer Caring Centres foundation was founded after her death. Maggie had already written about such a foundation in her diary, of which we have some documents on display. To start this program, many prominent architects like Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas designed some of the earlier centers, giving the program significant visibility. These are not hospitals, they are places where people with cancer and their families and caregivers can go as a kind of sanctuary for rest and reflection. Gardens are a key part of the designs. An example that we have in the exhibition is designed by Benedetta Tagliabue and located on the campus of Sant Pau, that beautiful Art-Nouveau-hospital in Barcelona.
DP: Probably this exhibition hits the Zeitgeist of our time, as almost everyone has experienced during COVID that the question of pandemics or epidemics is a spatial concern. Everyone has experienced physically the effects of separation, enclosure, isolation, etc. Even thinking about architecture in your first e-flux event, that took place in the fall of 2020. It started in the middle of pandemics, resulting out of a seminar that you, Beatriz, taught at Princeton University.
BC: That's how we came to the idea of the exhibition. I was teaching on architecture and pandemics way before COVID. Many dissertation topics came out of that class. For example, the dissertation of Iván López Munuera on AIDS and architecture or Victoria Bugge Øye on Coop Himmelb(l)au’s experiments in collaboration with a local hospital in Vienna.14 All of this was at least two years before COVID-19. I was teaching a class about the normal and the pathological, which I continued in the fall of 2019 with another seminar on architecture and illnesses focusing on things like the cholera epidemics. When COVID happened in the middle of all of this, students asked me: „How did you know?“ Of course, I didn't know, even if we have been warned for a long time. So there was all this research work, and since students were very discouraged from not being able to go to class in person anymore, or to travel for research, the idea came up talking with Nikolaus and Nick Axel of doing the first e-flux series on Sick Architecture. The students became very keen and happy about it, as suddenly there was a goal. So the first e-flux series was the result of the pandemic.
NH: Including other high-profile voices.
BC: Yes, of course, we invited Elisabeth Povinelli with her work on the virus as a figure and an infrastructure.15 Mark Wigley wrote an article about chronic whiteness.16 More recently, we invited Fabiola López-Durán on eugenics and Modern architecture, Brooke Holmes on eugenics in Ancient Greece17, David Gissen on architecture and disabilities18, and Emily Apter with her contemporary analysis of COVID denialism19, among others.
NH: To weave all these different voices into an exhibition I think has been one of the driving forces for us. It was really important to have this very diverse, transdisciplinary group of participants. Researchers such as Meredith TenHoor, but also practicing architects, or artists like Vivian Caccuri on colonization through the lens of the mosquito and Sammy Baloji on the Cordon Sanitaire in the Congo.