Sick Architecture & We the Bacteria book launch

e-flux Architecture and Bauhaus Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung are pleased to present a double book launch of Sick Architecture and We the Bacteria. Following presentations of both books, authors and editors Beatriz Colomina, Mark Wigley, Nick Axel, and Nikolaus Hirsch will discuss sickness and bacteria’s symbiosis with architecture.

Sick Architecture highlights a theme that has shaped life from the very beginnings of architecture to the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. Architects and doctors have always been entangled, influencing one another, though not always in sync. Drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary case studies, this book extends beyond sicknesses recognized by the medical profession to ask: What aspects of society may be ill, in need of care, or subject to pathologization? Likewise, it looks beyond buildings and cities to interrogate architecture’s policies, protocols, and spatial logics. With thirty-five diverse essays, Sick Architecture traces moments in global history when shifting notions of health became vectors for architectural practice and discourse—and when, conversely, architecture itself functioned as a reservoir and vector of illness.

We the Bacteria explores the intimate entanglements of the microbes within bodies and buildings over the last 10,000 years, culminating in the antibiotic philosophy of contemporary architecture. The diseases of our time are diseases of the built environment. The deadly combination of rapidly declining microbial diversity and rising antibiotic-resistant bacteria is as great a threat as climate change. Hostility to bacteria has to give way to new forms of hospitality from a more symbiotic architecture that learns from bacteria, embracing them and reconnecting with soil, plants and other species. Buildings based on fear of bacteria, which is to say fear of life itself, must give way to buildings learning from models of coexistence based on bacteria themselves. Colomina and Wigley draw on the latest research into microbes to rethink the past and possible futures of the built environment.

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, 2025), X-Ray Architecture (Lars Müller, 2019), Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design with Mark Wigley (Lars Müller, 2016), Sexuality and Space (PAP, 1992), and coedited Sick Architecture (MIT, 2025), Radical Pedagogies (MIT, 2022), and Clip/Stamp/Fold (Actar, 2010). She co-curated We the Bacteria: Toward Biotic Architecture at the Triennale Milano (2025) with Mark Wigley, and Sick Architecture at CIVA, Brussels (2022).  

Mark Wigley is Professor of Architecture and Dean Emeritus at Columbia University. His recent books include: We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture (with Beatriz Colomina), Konrad Wachsmann’s Television: Post-Architectural Transmissions; Passing Through Architecture: The 10 Years of Gordon Matta-Clark; Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation; Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (with Beatriz Colomina); and Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio. He has curated exhibitions at MoMA, The Drawing Center, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Het Nieuwe Instituut, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, and the Milan Triennale.

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

Nikolaus Hirsch is the director of Kanal Architecture (formerly CIVA) in Brussels. He was the Dean of Städelschule and Director of the Portikus in Frankfurt and taught at the AA in London. His architectural work includes the award-winning Dresden Synagogue, the pavilion Do We Dream Under The Same Sky (Art Basel/LUMA) and Becoming Monument in the contaminated zone of Fukushima. Hirsch curated numerous exhibitions at Portikus and CIVA (among others Sick Architecture, Style Congo and Power), Wohnungsfrage at the HKW in Berlin and the German Pavilion at the Architecture Biennale in Venice. He is the editor of the Critical Spatial Practice series at Sternberg Press and founder and editor of e-flux Architecture.

Sick Architecture, edited by Beatriz Colomina with Nick Axel, Guillermo S. Arsuaga and e-flux Architecture, The MIT Press, 2025, 360 pages, 168 color illustrations, 136 b&w illustrations, ISBN 9780262049689

Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, We the Bacteria, Lars Müller Publishers, 2025, 11 × 18 cm, 352 pages, 319 illustrations, paperback, ISBN 9783037787830.

Press: Christiane Caldari-Winkler, c.caldari-winkler@bauhaus.de.