Nous attirons votre attention sur le fait que ce séminaire sera dispensé en anglais par Beatriz Colomina.

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

Architecture and medicine have always been tightly interlinked. Architectural discourse weaves itself through theories of body and brain, constructing the architect as a kind of doctor and the client as patient. Every age has its signature afflictions and each affliction has its architecture. The age of bacterial diseases, particularly tuberculosis, gave birth to modern architecture, to white buildings detached from the “humid ground where disease breeds,” as Le Corbusier put it. The discovery of streptomycin put an end to that age. In the postwar years, attention shifted to psychological problems. The architect was not seen just as a doctor but as a shrink, the house not just a medical device for the prevention of disease, but for providing psychological comfort, “nervous health.” The twenty-first century is the age of neurological disorders: depression, ADHD, borderline personality disorders, burnout syndrome and allergies—the “environmentally hypersensitive” unable to live in the modern world. But pandemics have returned. With COVID-19, a virus is completely reshaping architecture and urbanism and once again disease exposes the structural inequities of race, class and gender. Will architectural discourse and practice likewise reshape itself ?

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), Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X–197X (2010) and Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (Lars Muller, 2016). She has curated a number of exhibitions including Clip/Stamp/Fold (2006), Playboy Architecture (2012), Radical Pedagogies (2014) and Sick Architecture (2022). In 2016 she was co-curator of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial. Her latest books are X-Ray Architecture (Lars Muller, 2019) and Radical Pedagogies (MIT, 2022).