Sick Architecture book launch

Illnesses, wellness, and architecture are inseparable. Medical professionals and architects have always been in a kind of dance, often influencing one another, though the dance is not always synchronized. Drawing from a wide range of historical and contemporary case studies from ancient Greece to twentieth-century India to present-day New York City, Sick Architecture (MIT, 2025) highlights a topic that has shaped our lives from the very beginnings of architecture to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond.

Sick Architecture goes beyond the sicknesses recognized by the medical profession to ask: What aspects of society may be ill, in need of care, or subject to pathologization? Similarly, the book goes beyond physical buildings and cities to interrogate architecture’s policy protocols and spatial logics. Its thirty-five diverse essays explore moments in global history when shifting notions of health became vectors for the development of architectural practice and discourse—as well as the reverse, when architecture acted as a reservoir and vector for illness.

Thursday, November 6, at 6pm
Please join the Princeton University School of Architecture in celebrating the launch of Sick Architecture. Editor and SoA Professor Beatriz Colomina will introduce the book, and participants will offer short presentations around their essay contributions, followed by a panel discussion with respondent Francesca Hughes.

Participants Include: Emily Apter, Guillermo S. Arsuaga, Nick Axel, Victoria Bergbauer, Xhulio Binjaku, Beatriz Colomina, Brooke Holmes, Angelika Ellen Joseph, Kara Morgan Plaxa Arxa, Maxwell Smith-Holmes, Iason Stathatos, Meredith TenHoor, Marie de Testa, Mark Wigley, and Chenchen Yan.

Free and open to the public. This event is made possible by the Jean Labatut Memorial Lectures in Architecture and Urban Planning Fund.

Friday, November 7, at 7pm
The next day, e-flux will host a second celebration at their Brooklyn, New York headquarters. Following a presentation of the book by Beatriz Colomina, Nick Axel, and Guillermo S. Arsuaga, they will be joined in dialogue by Emily Apter, David Gissen, Brooke Holmes, Francesca Hughes, and Mark Wigley.

Accessibility               
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue. 
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.          
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

About the book
Published by MIT Press, edited by Beatriz Colomina; with Nick Axel, Guillermo S. Arsuaga, and e-flux Architecture. 

Beatriz Colomina is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture at Princeton University. Her books include We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture with Mark Wigley (Lars Müller Publishers, 2025), X-Ray Architecture (Lars Müller Publishers, 2019), Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design with Mark Wigley (Lars Müller Publishers, 2016), Domesticity at War (Actar Publishers and MIT Press, 2007), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (MIT Press, 1994), and Sexuality and Space (Princeton Architectural Press, 1992). She co-curated "We the Bacteria: Toward Biotic Architecture" at the Triennale Milano (2025) with Mark Wigley, and her coedited volumes include Sick Architecture (MIT Press, 2025), Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press, 2022), and Clip/Stamp/Fold (Actar Publishers, 2010).

Nick Axel is Deputy Editor of e-flux Architecture and the Head of the Architectural Design department at Gerrit Rietveld Academie. He was recently Editor of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, and from 2020–2022, was Curator of Architecture and Chair of the Architectural Advisory Board at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, Kyiv.

Guillermo S. Arsuaga is an architect (ARB, RIBA), tutor in History and Theory Studies and in the HTC MA program at the AA, and a PhD candidate at Princeton University. He was a Mellon-Marron Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and is co-editor of Sick Architecture (MIT Press, 2025).