Theory of Hrchitecture History.
X-ray Architecture: Illness as Metaphor
Author(syf Beatriz Colomina
Source: Positions, No. 0, Positioning Positions (Fall 2008yf S S 5
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25835085 .
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This content downloaded from 132.206.27.24 on Mon, 15 Sep 2014 21:35:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Mies van der Rohe, A Sky Scraper for Berlin, 1921
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This content downloaded from 132.206.27.24 on Mon, 15 Sep 2014 21:35:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Beatriz Colomina
X-ray
Architecture:
Illness as
Metaphor
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Position is a spatial and ultimately military term. To take a position is by definition to have changed one's position, to move ground and therefore to
see the world differently for a while. Modern architecture is not only a subject that can be viewed from many angles, many positions, it is itself a way of
viewing. To be more precise, modern architecture is a way of changing
positions, a way of moving ground. It established an intellectual mobility that
is more critical than its more obvious physical mobility?the new freedoms of
movement of people and materials or even buildings. In a sense, modern
architecture is simply the promise that everything can move and in so doing be modern. To respect modern architecture, to appreciate it in detail, one must
move positions and keep seeing it through new eyes.
To give just one example of such change in viewing position, think about the
relationship between modern architecture and medical technologies for
viewing the body. 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 architecture can be argued to have
been shaped by the dominant medical obsession of its time: tuberculosis. It is
as though the widespread success of modern architecture depended on
its association with health, its internationalism the consequence of the global
spread of the disease it was meant to resist.
The principles of modern architecture seem to have been taken straight out of
a medical text on the disease. A year before the German microbiologist
Robert Koch discovered the tubercle bacillus in 1882, a standard medical
This content downloaded from 132.206.27.24 on Mon, 15 Sep 2014 21:35:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions book gave as the cause of the disease, among other things, "unfavorable
climate, sedentary indoor life, defective ventilation and deficiency of light." It
took a long time for these notions to lose credibility. As Susan Sontag writes:
"The TB patient was thought to be helped, even cured, by a change in environ
ment. There was a notion that TB was a wet disease, a disease of humid and
dank cities. The inside of the body became damp and had to be dried out."
Modern architects offered health by providing exactly such a change of
environment. Nineteenth-century architecture was demonized as unhealthy,
and sun, light, ventilation, exercise, roof terraces, hygiene, and whiteness
were offered as means to prevent, if not cure, tuberculosis. The publicity
campaign of modern architecture was organized around contemporary
beliefs about tuberculosis and fears of the disease.
In his book The Radiant City of 1935, Le Corbusier dismisses the "natural
ground" as "dispenser of rheumatism and tuberculosis" and declares it to be
"the enemy of man." He insists on detaching buildings, with the help of pilotis, from the "wet, humid, ground where disease breeds" and using the roof as a
garden for sunbathing and exercise. To reinforce the point, he uses pictures
taken from medical texts as architectural illustrations, showing the lungs and
their inner workings, while giving architectural illustrations medical labels, as
when a photograph of an old part of the city becomes, via caption, "Historic
Paris, tubercular Paris." Le Corbusier develops in this book a
concept of "exact respiration" whereby the indoor air is continually circulated
and cleaned, made "dust free, disinfected, . . . and ready to be consumed
by the lung." Opening windows are eliminated, and the facades become
walls of glass. One by one, all of the characteristic features of modern
architecture (pilotis, roof garden, glass walls, clean air, etc.yf turn out to have
been presented as medical devices. Even the walls are white to reveal any
contamination.
Indeed, it would seem as though modern architects and their promoters were
advocating life in a sanatorium. Take, for example, Siegfried Giedion's
little 1929 book Befreites Wohnen ("Liberated Dwelling"yf which is subtitled
Licht, Luft, Oeffnung ("Light, Air, Opening"yf almost like the slogan of a
sanatorium. Under the cover of a book on the modern house we find more than
half of the illustrations dedicated to hospitals and to sports: Richard Docker's
sanatorium in Waiblingen (1926-1928yf Bernard Bijvoet and Johannes
Duiker's Zonnestraal Sanatorium in Hilversum (1927yf a 1907 sanatorium in
Davos (famous site of Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountainyf sports
stadia, images of gymnastics, sunbathing, tennis, etc. When we get to the houses,
they seem to have been turned themselves into sanatoriums, with convalescents
resting on long chairs on terraces (as in a picture of a Max Haefeli house in
Zurich of 1928yf or into gyms, as in Marcel Breuer's bedroom for Erwin Piscator
in Berlin (1927-1928yf with its gymnastic equipment, and Andre Lur^at's gym on the roof of the Guggenbuhl House in Paris (1926-1927yf
Another influential book of that time, Richard Docker's Terrassentyp of 1927,
follows the development of the terrace in modern architecture from the
sanatorium to the home, starting with his own sanatorium in Waiblingen and
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proceeding to Zonnestraal, Davos, etc., making a seamless transition from the
terraces of sanatoriums to the terraces of modern houses. Diagrams show
the penetration of the sun rays in modern sanatoriums and in modern terrace
houses and the book concludes with a series of photographs of domestic
terraces furnished with exercise equipment.
Modern buildings even started to look like medical images. The impact of the
technology of the X-ray is evident in the work of many avant-garde architects
of the early decades of the twentieth century. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe wrote
about his work as "skin and bone" architecture and referred to the structure
of his Glass Skyscraper of 1922 as "the skeleton," rendering the project as if
seen through an X-ray machine. Mies was not alone. Architecture slide libraries
are filled with contemporaneous images of translucent glass skins revealing inner bones and organs. Take, for example, Le Corbusier's Glass Skyscraper
(1925yf Walter Gropius's Bauhaus (1926yf Johannes Brinkman's Van Nelle
Factory in Rotterdam (1925-1927yf George Keek's Crystal House in the
1933-1934 Fair in Chicago, and Paul Nelson's Suspended House (1935yf
Books on modern architecture look like collections of chest X-rays. This is more
than a dominant aesthetic. It is a symptom of a deep-seated philosophy of
design derived from medical discourse.
The birth of the technology of the X-ray and of modern architecture coincide.
They evolve in parallel. If experiments with glass were numerous in the early
years of the century, they still tended to be isolated esoteric projects by
avant-garde architects. Only by mid-century does the see-through house
become a mass phenomenon, just as the mobilization against TB involved
programs for the mass X-raying of the entire population. Mobile X-ray
machines appeared in places such as department stores, industries, schools,
and suburban streets, supported by a barrage of newspaper articles, radio
broadcasts, and films. Glass walls, like X-rays, are instruments of control. Just
as the X-ray exposes the inside of the body to the public eye, the modern
house exposed its interior. That which was previously private was now subject to public scrutiny.
Indeed, the association between X-rays and glass houses became a common
place in mid-century popular culture. Images of glass houses appeared in
educational films on TB while images of X-rays appeared in mass media
discussions of glass houses. For example, in Highlights and Shadows, a 1937
Kodak Research Laboratories film on the virtues of X-rays in disease prevention
by the filmmaker-radiographer James Sibley Watson, Jr., a woman wearing a
swimming suit is shown strapped to a laboratory table while her body is
subjected to X-rays. As her photographic image gives way to the image of her
X-rayed body, the narrator declares: "This young lady, to whom henceforth a
glass house should hold no terrors, will after an examination of her radio
graphs, be reassured that she is indeed physically fit." The glass house acted
as a symbol of both the new form of surveillance and of health.
Exactly the same set of associations can be seen in the discourse around
canonical works of modern architecture. In the course of an interview in House
This content downloaded from 132.206.27.24 on Mon, 15 Sep 2014 21:35:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Beautiful, Edith Farnsworth, a successful doctor in Chicago, compared her
famous weekend house, designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1949, to an
X-ray and goes on to say that there is also a local rumor that the house is a
tuberculosis sanatorium. The X-ray aesthetic is inseparable from the discourse
about the disease. Modern architecture was literally presented and
understood as a piece of medical equipment. To study the direct association
between diagnostic technologies and architecture is to open a longer history,
stretching before and after the avant-garde of the 1920s.
Architecture and medicine have always been tightly linked. Just as schools of
medicine used casts of body parts, schools of architecture used cast fragments of historical buildings for teaching, and the same conventions for representing
the body's interior were used to represent the interiors of buildings. During the Renaissance, for example, when doctors investigated the mysterious interior of the body by cutting into and dissecting it, architects tried to under
stand the interiors of buildings by slicing section cuts through them. In the
sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci, cutaway views of architectural interiors
appear beside anatomical drawings. He understood the interiors of the brain
and the womb in architectural terms, as enclosures that must be cut through to reveal their secrets. The central reference for architecture was no longer a
whole body but a dissected, fragmented, analyzed body. Eugene Viollet-le
Duc likewise illustrates his Dictionnaire raisonne de ^architecture fran$aise du
XI au XVIe siecle (1854-1868yf with perspectival sectional cutaway drawings
showing medieval buildings as if dissected. In his preface to the first volume,
Viollet-le-Duc?who, as Barry Bergdoll has pointed out, was influenced by
Georges Cuvier's Legons d'anatomie comparee (1800-1805yf " F D O O H G for the
study of medieval architecture as that of an "animate being," involving "dissection" to allow separate study of its parts. He developed a new mode of
drawing to show the functional role of each dissected fragment.
As medical representations changed, so did architectural representations. In
the twentieth century, the widespread use of X-rays made a new way of
thinking about architecture possible. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the
CAT scan (Computerized Axial Tomographyyf may be for the field what the
basic X-ray was for architects early in the twentieth century. In fact, the CAT
scan is simply many X-ray images compiled by a computer to generate cross
sectional views and three-dimensional images of the body's internal organs. A typical medical brochure describes the layering of slices: "Imagine the body as a loaf of bread and you are looking at one end of the loaf. As you remove
each slice of bread, you can see the entire surface of that slice from the
crust to the center." The crust, skin, or envelope becomes an almost invisible
line. What matters is the dense interior, which is rendered like a new, more
complex kind of facade.
As with the X-ray, architects have been quick to respond. If architectural
publications at the beginning and middle of the century were full of X-rays,
contemporary architectural publications are full of CAT-scan images. For
example, in a 1992 catalog of an exhibition of his work, Josep Lluis Mateo
shows a CAT scan of a brain on the cover and insists that "The architect has to
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act with the callousness of the medic: he cuts, analyses, researches. But he
must never mummify an organism that lived once." Likewise, UNStudio show
CAT scans of the brain alongside their projects in their book Move. The
Renaissance obsession with the brain continues into the twenty-first century, as
does the interest in the fetus, evidenced by the "embryological" work done by
digital architects.
The influence of the CAT scan is reflected in turn of the century architectural
envelopes. In OMA's entry to the Bibliotheque Nationale de France competition, the exposure of a skeleton behind a glass skin gives way to translucent bodies
revealing organs. Foreign Office Architecture's Yokohama Port Terminal also
seems to follow the logic of the CAT scan: An endless series of section cuts is
used to assemble a three-dimensional body. At Yokohama, there is no simple
opposition between the outside and the inside. Its dream is to be a continuously folded surface where structure and skin are one and where there are no bones
or discrete organs.
Today, there are new instruments of medical diagnosis and new systems of
architectural representation. Each implies new positions for architecture and
new positions for criticism. The position of the historian or the critic is after all
a diagnostic one. Analyzing the intimate relationship between modern
architecture and medicine simultaneously opens up new readings of modern
architecture and new ways of reading all forms of architecture, multiplying
positions, which is a healthy thing for the field. The strength and resilience of
historiography, as with modern architecture, comes from the capacity to
change and multiply positions.
This content downloaded from 132.206.27.24 on Mon, 15 Sep 2014 21:35:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
