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X-RAY ARCHITECTURE

IN CONVERSATION WITH BEATRIZ COLOMINA

Paimio Sanatorium by Alvar Aalto, Paimio, Finland. Image courtesy of The Alvar Aalto Foundation.

Professor Beatriz Colomina is an internationally renowned architectural historian. She visited Melbourne in 2019 to present a lecture on her latest book, X-Ray Architecture, at the Melbourne School of Design. This work challenges traditional understandings of Modern architecture and its origins. Through her research into tuberculosis and the evolution of the X-Ray, Professor Colomina proposes how Modern architecture emerged as a medical instrument.

Inflection vol. 6 editors interviewed Professor Beatriz Colomina in May 2019. Through our conversation, she revealed her thoughts on the influence of illness on architecture and the importance of reading original texts without preconceived ideas. With this approach, new insights may come from historical works.

In your book X-Ray Architecture, you explain how illness played a major role in shaping Modern architecture. Does illness also plays a role in the contemporary architectural landscape?

Yes, I think that illness has always been part of architecture. Vitruvius, it is at the very beginning of Western architectural theory—but in every culture, we can see this relationship between design and health. So it has always been a question—since the Renaissance, and in other cultures, Chinese culture, theories about the health of the inhabitants is very much a part of our understanding of architecture.

I think every age has its afflictions, its diseases, that are fascinating. There are many other illnesses, but there are particular ones that capture our imagination because they are somehow significant for the time in which we are living. So if tuberculosis was the disease of the 19th-century and the beginning of the 20th-century, we now have different kinds of problems such as attention deficit disorder, autism, ‘burnout syndrome’ and many other diseases that did not exist in the early 20th-century. Like extreme allergies—people are now allergic to everything. There are so many people that are intolerant to food, intolerant to carpet, intolerant to solvents. So these are architectural issues. The building itself is what is sick.

Perhaps there is also a Modernist idea there that architecture is able to cure things—like society’s ills as well.

Yes, that’s one side of it, and the other hand is that now we have become very suspicious of the building. So the building itself is what is sick, and thus it’s making us sick. There are so many chemicals, so many solvents, so many allergens in a building. A lot of the preoccupations of today have to do with how we clean or act. How do we build less toxic buildings? Not only to us but also to the environment. So it’s shifting the attention from the person being ill to the building being sick—for example, sick building syndrome, or our whole preoccupation today with the health of our planet. Architecture plays an enormous role in this situation.

What about the ingestible ‘pill’ camera—the M2A—that you talked about in Skinless Architecture? How does this kind of technology impact architecture?

I was thinking with the M2A about how the X-ray has had an enormous impact on the way we see architecture, because of transparency—it’s hard to see inside, how the generation of the 1990s became fascinated with the CAT scan and the MRI and how that ended up affecting architecture. It was speculation—I started looking on the internet for what is happening now in the world of medicine—it was around the year 2000, and they had just approved this camera that was the size of a pill, and you take it inside, and it snaps 64,000 images of the gastrointestinal tract.

People are using that all the time now instead of more invasive techniques, but that represents a new type of architecture where the building is turned inside out. So if architects were fascinated with this technology—I’m not sure they are, but I know artists that are, Mona Hatoum for example, who have done a lot of artwork based on colonoscopies and cameras that are inside of your body. You’re putting the inside of your body on display as a public thing. It was more like launching something to the future.

It’s so hard to think about the present. Nobody knows what is happening until it has passed—‘Oh that was about that!’ So at this moment, we were asked to think about what might happen. I thought it would be nice to think about technologies of viewing the body emerging at the time. If they affected architecture, what kind of impact would that be? There are more and more buildings where there is no envelope. So maybe I was right. Maybe there was a connection between this vision inside the body and the way that we are seeing buildings. But we will never know that now, we will never know until later.

Beatriz Colomina in conversation with students in the Japanese Room at the Melbourne School of Design, May 2019. Image courtesy of James Rafferty.

When you talk about the original sources, you suggest that health constantly comes up in the writing of that period, but in your words “nobody else seems to notice this.” Do you think that there is a problem with the way that people are reading and interpreting these sources?

They read the source, and they are already so influenced by what they have read previously that they are only seeing what somebody else has seen. So they see a publication of Mies in the 1920s where he has published an X-ray, and they don’t see the X-ray. They know what they have read about Mies before. ‘Oh, Mies, look—he is interested in glass and concrete architecture.’ People become blind; we all become blind. Whatever information you bring into the situation somehow informs that experience, and we all do that. But the solution I suppose is to try to see with clear eyes again. If we keep repeating what other people have said, we are just weakening the argument. There’s no freshness there. It’s a necessity.

You reference the view of Vitruvius that an architect should know a little bit about everything. You have researched media, gender and now medicine, how does the perspective of Vitruvius benefits us as architects?

I think I’m a good example of what Vitruvius said—to know a little bit about everything. It’s not the right to know about everything, and it’s just that all of these questions are already a part of the architectural world whether I like it or not. But there is a particular focus towards all these issues and many more. Architects have always been people interested in everything.

When the first scanners in airports emerged, and I would go for reviews at Harvard, I would see that when the architects were passing—after the reports we were all flying to New York or elsewhere—we were causing a collapse of the machine. Not because we had anything to show but simply because people were stopping to look at these new X-ray images in colour and you could immediately see what effect it had on their work a few months later, we are fascinated with everything.

Architects give lectures, and they talk about all kinds of things. The architect has always been interested in a lot of things, and I think Vitruvius was already personally interested in a lot of things. Anything—the space program, the last microbe that was discovered—there will be an architect who is into that. I think that’s fascinating.

Do you think that there have been times when architects were too inward looking? You said that when you were young and interested in these questions about health and medicine there was no climate for it.

Yes, that was the formalist period where people like Peter Eisenman and the Institute were talking about the autonomy of architecture. Autonomy means that architecture is cut out of everything else in life. Architecture is not autonomous from everything. We depend on so many people. The client, the commission, the developer, the politicians, the regulations—so to talk about architecture as autonomous is quite strange. But they were very much into this idea that architecture was autonomous and the only thing that should concern us was the formal aspects of architecture. That was very much under the influence of people like Colin Rowe and Peter Eisenman. It was a particular moment in the history of architecture.

You also said last night that at the time you were writing about media, people behaved as though media was the illness of architecture.

Yes, they didn’t want to talk about it—‘Oh no, surely Le Corbusier didn’t have anything to do with the media.’ However, you find he’s collecting catalogues, he’s fascinated by advertisements, he’s actively looking for all this material. In the end, the books that he writes are positively influenced by all this activity of advertising. But of course at the time, Colin Rowe was a very influential theorist, and the ideas of Corbusier and the relationship with Palladio were all formalist ideas. I cannot complain because Privacy and Publicity did very well immediately. But when I was writing it, I could see people reacting—‘Really? But that’s not the Corbusier I know!’—But that’s the one I know. A lack of curiosity, that’s the problem.

The idea of interdisciplinarity and diversity in the profession is very topical at the moment. Do you have any thoughts about what brought about this current moment?

I don’t know why people are talking about it now, and the reality is that interdisciplinarity has always been a part of architecture. Vitruvius said that architects are interested and know a little bit about everything. When you go to people like Adolf Loos, they knew about everything. They knew about theatre, fashion, food—they wrote about all of these things. It’s always been a part of the architecture to write about everything and not just buildings. Buildings are the one thing Loos didn’t write about. He wrote about the shoes, the carpet, everything—but not architecture. It’s the cultural language you have that you need to understand. We are not inventing anything. It’s been around for a long time.