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Treatment
Editors Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, Adam Jasper
Contributors David Theodore, Fiona L. Kenney, Brittany Utting, Magaly Tornay, Sally Chivers, Annmarie Adams, e-flux Architecture, Adam Jasper, Maria Böhmer, Lydia Xynogala, and more…

Hospitalization is the last resort for the treatment of an infectious patient, not for the sake of the patient, but for the hospital itself. Putting a contagious person into a complex, highly centralized institution full of sick people is not actually a good idea, from epidemiological and administrative perspectives. What, then, are hospitals for?

Treatment is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zürich (2021 and 2025), and Istituto Svizzero, Rome (2025).

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13 essays
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Context vs. Paradigm: On Le Corbusier, Herzog & de Meuron, and the Idea of the Hospital
Stanislaus von Moos
The older people get, the more frequent the occasions to experience one’s body being subjected to the logic of clinical expediency.
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The Love Life of Utilitarianism
Agnes Arnold-Forster
In Britain, the National Health Service (NHS) is not so much admired as revered. It is more than just a state-funded, free-at-the-point-of-access health service: it is a profoundly politicized cultural icon, imbued with nostalgia for the postwar social contract and the “golden age” of the welfare state.
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The Hospital of the Future
Alex Retegan and Reinier de Graaf
Hospitals are among the least appealing projects for an architect, second, perhaps, only to prisons. The brief of a hospital project is long and complex enough to discourage creativity.
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Blood Cars: Polio, Cyborg Lungs, and the New Medical Device Industry
Yvan Prkachin
The next time you happen to be in a hospital (hopefully as an observer, rather than as a patient), you will likely find yourself surrounded by machines: X-ray machines, fMRI machines, ultrasounds. The images they make constitute the flashiest products of modern medical knowledge
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Ospedale degli Innocenti: The Loggia and the Creation of the Public Sphere
Britta Hentschel
As keystones of the healthcare sector, hospitals have developed into highly-complex organizations, ones that are internally arranged according to the intricate processes they execute, but are frequently barely legible as architecture.
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Geopathologies: The Birth of the Hydroclinic
Lydia Xynogala
To find the source of the Loutra Ypatis, “the baths of Ypati,” follow the sulfurous smell. It will lead you to a hexagonal kiosk in the middle of a rather unkept park in a village that sits at the foot of Oiti Mountain, some 200km northwest of Athens.
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Editorial: The Image of the Hospital
e-flux Architecture, Adam Jasper, and Maria Böhmer
In the mid-twentieth century, answers to the question of what (and whom) hospitals are for would have been self-explanatory.
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Deception and Design: The Rise of the Dementia Village
Sally Chivers and Annmarie Adams
De Hogeweyk, in Weesp, the Netherlands, might seem eerily familiar, even if you’ve never been there. [figure ARC_TRE_AASC_2] Like a real villag...
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Dreaming Nurses
Magaly Tornay
The strange story of the dreaming nurses of Münsterlingen came to me by a chance find in the archives. While researching the extensive experiments wit...
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Public Proxies
Brittany Utting
In 1925, on an undeveloped tract of forested land at the outskirts of the young city of Houston, entrepreneur and oil magnate George H. Hermann built ...
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Learning to Feel
Fiona L. Kenney
In the April 1881 issue of The Modern Review, a British periodical published from 1880 to 1884, a sardonic Frances Power Cobbe wrote: “It is the ...
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From Care to Cure and Back Again
David Theodore
When scholars first charted the nineteenth-century “invention” of the modern hospital around a half century ago, they posited a crucial change: a shif...
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Editorial
Adam Jasper, Nikolaus Hirsch, and Nick Axel
Treatment is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zürich, featuring con...
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Subject
Architecture, Health & Disease, Care, Ethics, Housing & Real Estate

Treatment is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zürich (2021 and 2025), and Istituto Svizzero, Rome (2025).

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