Sick Architecture
Edited by Beatriz Colomina with Nick Axel, Guillermo S. Arsuaga and e-flux Architecture
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 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.
Sick Architecture features contributions by: An Tairan, Emily Apter, Guillermo S. Arsuaga, Victoria Bergbauer, Xhulio Binjaku, Gideon Boie, Edna Bonhomme, Ibiayi Briggs, Angela Brown, Holly Bushman, Beatriz Colomina, Marie de Testa, Clemens Finkelstein, Dante Furioso, David Gissen, Samia Henni, Samia Henni, Brooke Holmes, Patrick Jaojoco, Angelika Joseph, Rebecca Kellawan, Johan Lagae, Fabiola López-Durán, Iván López Munuera, Simon De Nys-Ketels, Victoria Bugge Øye, Kara Morgan Plaxa Arxa, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Karel Proot, Giuseppina Scavuzzo, Nicholas Shapiro, Shivani Shedde, Maxwell Smith-Holmes, Iason Stathatos, Meredith TenHoor, Jessica Varner, Mark Wigley, Jeremy Wolin, and Chenchen Yan.
Sick Architecture
Edited by Beatriz Colomina with Nick Axel, Guillermo S. Arsuaga and e-flux Architecture
Hardcover / USD 55 / ISBN: 9780262049689
Publication date: October 21, 2025
Publisher: The MIT Press
360 pp., 168 color illus., 136 b&w illus.
