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X-Ray Architecture
How our medical obsessions and the image of the body influence modern architecture. This book explores the impact of medical discourse and diagnostic technologies on the formation, representation and reception of modern architecture. It challenges the normal understanding of modern architecture by proposing that the architecture of the early 20th century was shaped by the dominant medical obsession of its time: tuberculosis and its primary diagnostic tool, the X-ray. If architectural discourse has from its beginning associated building and body, the body that it describes is the medical body, reconstructed by each new theory of health. Modern architects presented their architecture as a kind of medical instrument for protecting and enhancing the body. X-ray technology and modern architecture were born around the same time and evolved in parallel. While the X-ray exposed the inside of the body to the public eye, the modern building unveiled its interior, inverting the relationship between private and public. Colomina suggests that if we want to talk about the state of the art in buildings, we should look to the dominant obsessions about illness and the latest techniques of imaging the body--and ask what effects they may have on the way we conceive architecture.
200 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2019
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413 people want to read
About the author
Beatriz Colomina
72 books58 followersBeatriz Colomina is founding director of the program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University and Professor in the School of Architecture.
She has written extensively on the interrelationships between architecture, art, media, sexuality and health.
She has written extensively on the interrelationships between architecture, art, media, sexuality and health.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 18, 2023
A couple of years ago I asked people here on Goodreads if they knew of any books that might explain the gendering of space. The problem was that I hadn’t been particularly clear about what I was after and some of the books recommended looked at how certain spaces – most spaces at night, for instance - where a threat to women, and so were gendered male. This is a completely reasonable response to my question – but it wasn’t quite what I was after. Someone else suggested this author, but while I meant to read her at the time, I got distracted with other things. This book proved to be much more what I had in mind.
This book is insanely interesting. The first thing to notice here is that the history of architecture has been a history of comparing buildings to the human body. And not just as a metaphor – although that too, obviously. You know, buildings, particularly ones we are going to live in, need ventilation, a place to cook, a place to contemplate, a toilet – and these can be metaphorically linked to mouths, stomachs, anuses, brains. But some architects mean this much more than merely metaphorically. They see buildings as a literal extension of the human body and as such enable or disable us in ways we might not even fully realise while we live in them. The relationship between health and the architectural structures of buildings has been a theme in architecture from the start. You know, this room is west-facing and so it is lovely to sit here on a winter’s afternoon, that kind of thing. Buildings provide extensions to us and so they facilitate or hinder us – perhaps often in ways we don’t even realise since we are likely to see (or feel rather) the building as if it was ‘natural’, despite it being an artificial construction designed to meet our own needs and wants.
The author’s point is greater than this. Our understanding of the nature of disease impacts the buildings that we construct and how we live within them. My favourite example of this is the fact that the city I live in has very wide streets in the central business district. This was because when the city was being planned, people were obsessed with science, but they didn’t understand the causes of disease – they assumed, not unreasonably, that disease was caused by bad air. This meant that having wide streets could be a preventative for the spread of disease, since it allowed more clean air between you and the source of the smell.
This book looks, in part, at the problem TB presented to architecture and the impact that disease had upon how buildings were constructed. A lot of this involved a movement away from the heavy ornamentation of the Victorian era, ornamentation that allowed dust and dirt to accumulate and hide. This was most obviously spurred on by the development of sanatoria, which, when they first appeared, must have seemed incredibly Spartan. Spartan and scientific. Walls that could be washed, an abundance of light and fresh air – the health benefits after leaving crowded cities with barely proper sanitation must have been striking.
The point was to attempt to recreate these spaces, or built spaces like these, in the cities themselves. As the author makes clear, most modern architecture is in cities, even if the majority of people at the time didn’t yet live in cities themselves. But this was also true of most diseases - it took a long time for cities to became a healthy option when compared to the countryside.
The author also points to the dialectical relationship between buildings and humans in other ways too. While the architecture of the time liked to refer to itself as ‘functionalist’, it isn’t immediately obvious that humans or buildings actually have functions that are not created with the creation of the building itself. I mean this, at least in part, for both humans and buildings. What is the function of a human? Hard to answer. But certain things are made easier to do in buildings by good architectural design, and that facilitates those functions. And this makes those functions appear natural. Certain design features might make it more likely that people will exercise. Others will make working easier. Others will make it easier to read in the afternoon. The facilitation of functions changes how people relate to one another and to the spaces created by the architects. The built form changes us, changes the content of our actions within that form.
But TB changed with the discovery of x-rays. What had been hidden became transparent. And this change became something of an obsession within architecture too. The ability to see the underlying structures of buildings, and of people too, became a theme of design. There is an amazing image of some young women as beauty contestants at the time standing beside x-ray images of themselves. The ability to see below the surface (beyond the superficial) became a central metaphor of the age, and so buildings also became transparent in much the same way. Not only was ornamentation stripped back, but you could see its bones in much the same way that you can in an x-ray. In fact, there is a wonderful image here where an architect has their building superimposed over an x-ray of a human body. The floors of the building being the bones and glass walls allowing us to observe what was not otherwise essential structure.
What’s particularly interesting is that x-rays became quite the thing for a long time. Something I didn’t know about, I'd never thought of x-rays as a fashion trend. So, you could go to a shoe store and have your foot x-rayed to ensure you got a proper fit – whatever that might mean. People didn’t realise how dangerous x-rays could be at the time and so this was all done with abandon.
Okay, digression time. While I was reading this book I started to wonder if the physical appearance of male and female genitalia also had an influence on all of this. I can’t help feel that brutalist and functionalist architecture is particularly ‘masculine’ and that styles with lots of ornamentation are conceived as being ‘feminine’. And that a naked man’s sex organs are obvious and superficial – while whatever is important about female sexual organs is hidden from sight. As architecture becomes increasingly masculine, it also becomes more superficial and what is hidden becomes transparent. Everything becomes visible. There is no privacy. All is glass and light and constant surveillance. There is nowhere to hide, and to want to hide shows a kind of distain for ‘the truth’. As The Vapors said in Turning Japanese – 'I asked my doctor to take your picture so I can look at you from inside as well'. I hadn’t realised that this was actually something that had already been thought of by Thomas Mann in his The Magic Mountain.
This is such an interesting book.
This book is insanely interesting. The first thing to notice here is that the history of architecture has been a history of comparing buildings to the human body. And not just as a metaphor – although that too, obviously. You know, buildings, particularly ones we are going to live in, need ventilation, a place to cook, a place to contemplate, a toilet – and these can be metaphorically linked to mouths, stomachs, anuses, brains. But some architects mean this much more than merely metaphorically. They see buildings as a literal extension of the human body and as such enable or disable us in ways we might not even fully realise while we live in them. The relationship between health and the architectural structures of buildings has been a theme in architecture from the start. You know, this room is west-facing and so it is lovely to sit here on a winter’s afternoon, that kind of thing. Buildings provide extensions to us and so they facilitate or hinder us – perhaps often in ways we don’t even realise since we are likely to see (or feel rather) the building as if it was ‘natural’, despite it being an artificial construction designed to meet our own needs and wants.
The author’s point is greater than this. Our understanding of the nature of disease impacts the buildings that we construct and how we live within them. My favourite example of this is the fact that the city I live in has very wide streets in the central business district. This was because when the city was being planned, people were obsessed with science, but they didn’t understand the causes of disease – they assumed, not unreasonably, that disease was caused by bad air. This meant that having wide streets could be a preventative for the spread of disease, since it allowed more clean air between you and the source of the smell.
This book looks, in part, at the problem TB presented to architecture and the impact that disease had upon how buildings were constructed. A lot of this involved a movement away from the heavy ornamentation of the Victorian era, ornamentation that allowed dust and dirt to accumulate and hide. This was most obviously spurred on by the development of sanatoria, which, when they first appeared, must have seemed incredibly Spartan. Spartan and scientific. Walls that could be washed, an abundance of light and fresh air – the health benefits after leaving crowded cities with barely proper sanitation must have been striking.
The point was to attempt to recreate these spaces, or built spaces like these, in the cities themselves. As the author makes clear, most modern architecture is in cities, even if the majority of people at the time didn’t yet live in cities themselves. But this was also true of most diseases - it took a long time for cities to became a healthy option when compared to the countryside.
The author also points to the dialectical relationship between buildings and humans in other ways too. While the architecture of the time liked to refer to itself as ‘functionalist’, it isn’t immediately obvious that humans or buildings actually have functions that are not created with the creation of the building itself. I mean this, at least in part, for both humans and buildings. What is the function of a human? Hard to answer. But certain things are made easier to do in buildings by good architectural design, and that facilitates those functions. And this makes those functions appear natural. Certain design features might make it more likely that people will exercise. Others will make working easier. Others will make it easier to read in the afternoon. The facilitation of functions changes how people relate to one another and to the spaces created by the architects. The built form changes us, changes the content of our actions within that form.
But TB changed with the discovery of x-rays. What had been hidden became transparent. And this change became something of an obsession within architecture too. The ability to see the underlying structures of buildings, and of people too, became a theme of design. There is an amazing image of some young women as beauty contestants at the time standing beside x-ray images of themselves. The ability to see below the surface (beyond the superficial) became a central metaphor of the age, and so buildings also became transparent in much the same way. Not only was ornamentation stripped back, but you could see its bones in much the same way that you can in an x-ray. In fact, there is a wonderful image here where an architect has their building superimposed over an x-ray of a human body. The floors of the building being the bones and glass walls allowing us to observe what was not otherwise essential structure.
What’s particularly interesting is that x-rays became quite the thing for a long time. Something I didn’t know about, I'd never thought of x-rays as a fashion trend. So, you could go to a shoe store and have your foot x-rayed to ensure you got a proper fit – whatever that might mean. People didn’t realise how dangerous x-rays could be at the time and so this was all done with abandon.
Okay, digression time. While I was reading this book I started to wonder if the physical appearance of male and female genitalia also had an influence on all of this. I can’t help feel that brutalist and functionalist architecture is particularly ‘masculine’ and that styles with lots of ornamentation are conceived as being ‘feminine’. And that a naked man’s sex organs are obvious and superficial – while whatever is important about female sexual organs is hidden from sight. As architecture becomes increasingly masculine, it also becomes more superficial and what is hidden becomes transparent. Everything becomes visible. There is no privacy. All is glass and light and constant surveillance. There is nowhere to hide, and to want to hide shows a kind of distain for ‘the truth’. As The Vapors said in Turning Japanese – 'I asked my doctor to take your picture so I can look at you from inside as well'. I hadn’t realised that this was actually something that had already been thought of by Thomas Mann in his The Magic Mountain.
This is such an interesting book.
June 10, 2020
super evocative, wished it was longer/some things teased out a little bit more.
April 12, 2024
Another great investigation into the evolution/dissolution between private and public, self and other, interior and exterior, this time through a medical lens. Only critique is that I wish she explained exactly how contemporary architecture is contributing to “sick-building syndrome” in her afterward. Most people do not live in modern-style buildings, so how can we say that modern architecture is making us sick?
Other than that, a quick and invigorating read that I will reference for a long time.
Other than that, a quick and invigorating read that I will reference for a long time.
March 15, 2025
Increíble libro, conciso y de amable lectura.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews