We’ve gone, Colomina said, “from hospital architecture to living in a place like a hospital,” and suddenly, in the pandemic, that template seems less useful. The houses are presumably the safe space.” The problem is, the modernist aesthetic has become shorthand for good taste, rehashed by West Elm and minimalist life-style influencers our homes and offices have been designed as so many blank, empty boxes. “The enemy is in the street, in public spaces, in mass transit. During quarantine, “we are asked to be inside our own little cells,” Colomina told me when I called her recently at her apartment, in downtown Manhattan. As tuberculosis shaped modernism, so COVID-19 and our collective experience of staying inside for months on end will influence architecture’s near future. In recent months, we have arrived at a new juncture of disease and architecture, where fear of contamination again controls what kinds of spaces we want to be in. Read The New Yorker’s complete news coverage and analysis of the coronavirus pandemic. has upon me the ultimate effect of an inward purification and rebirth.” A tuberculosis vaccine began to be used on humans in 1921, but the association between modernism and good health stuck the austere sanatoriums were marketed as palliatives for mental illnesses, too. A character in Thomas Mann’s novella “Tristan,” from 1903, described a “long, white, rectilinear” sanatorium for lung patients: “This brightness and hardness, this cold, austere simplicity and reserved strength . . . “Tuberculosis helped make modern architecture modern,” the Princeton professor Beatriz Colomina writes in her revisionary history “ X-Ray Architecture.” The industrialized austerity of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or Marcel Breuer “is unambiguously that of the hospital,” the empty white walls, bare floors, and clean metal fixtures are all “surfaces that, as it were, demonstrate their cleanliness.”Īs extreme as the aesthetic of modernist architecture seemed in the early twentieth century, people could at least be reassured that it was safe. Architects collaborated with progressive doctors to build other sanatoriums across Europe. Adolf Loos’s ultra-boxy Villa Müller in Prague, from 1930, included a separate space in which to quarantine sick children. Le Corbusier lifted his houses off the humid ground to avoid contamination. Much of modernist architecture can be understood as a consequence of the fear of disease, a desire to eradicate dark rooms and dusty corners where bacteria lurk. At the sanatorium, the architecture itself was part of the cure.
CORONA VS VRAY WINDOWS
“The color of the ceiling is chosen for quietness, the light sources are outside of the patient's field of vision, the heating is oriented toward the patient’s feet.” (The combination of cold feet and a feverish head was seen as a symptom of the disease.) Broad daylight from the windows as well as the terraces, where patients could sleep, was part of the treatment, as sun had been proved effective at killing tuberculosis bacteria. “The room design is determined by the depleted strength of the patient, reclining in his bed,” Aalto explained. Tuberculosis was one of the early twentieth century’s most pressing health concerns each element of the Paimio was conceived to promote recovery from the disease. “The main purpose of the building is to function as a medical instrument,” Hugo would later write. The building is rigidly geometric, with long walls of expansive windows wrapping its façade, light-colored rooms, and a wide roof terrace with railings like the ones on cruise ships-all the hallmarks of what we now know as modernist architecture, which emerged in the twenties from the work of the Bauhaus, in Germany, and Le Corbusier, in France.īut the Aaltos’ choices of material and design weren’t just aesthetically fashionable. In 1933, the Finnish architect and designer Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto, along with his first wife, Aino, completed the Paimio Sanatorium, a facility for the treatment of tuberculosis in southwest Finland. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.