Noah Chasin
A collection of three dozen essays examines the intertwined histories of built environments and the scourges they harbor, house, and cause.
Sick Architecture, edited by Beatriz Colomina with Nick Axel, Guillermo S. Arsuaga, and e-flux Architecture, MIT Press, 359 pages, $55
• • •
Sick Architecture confronts our worsening apocalyptic condition head-on. Across 359 pages and thirty-six essays—half authored by Princeton doctoral students—the volume evolves out of a yearslong project: graduate seminars starting in 2017, articles in e-flux, and a 2022 Brussels exhibition. At its core lies a provocative claim: that architecture serves as both metaphor and mechanism for human dysfunction, a frame through which to read our collective impairments.
The book traces intertwined histories of built environments and the scourges they harbor, house, and sometimes cause. COVID-19’s upheaval made these connections pellucid—exacerbating the already extant conditions of inequality that break down across racial and socioeconomic lines. The case studies, ranging from antiquity to the present day, reveal centuries of entanglement between structure and suffering.
Editor Beatriz Colomina has always demonstrated an instinct for intellectual currents before they crest, and her new edited volume is no exception. She and her collaborators ride the emerging wave of ailment-as-allegory studies: Glenn Albrecht’s idea of “solastalgia” describes the strange feeling of being homesick while still at home, as one watches a once-familiar environment deteriorate. Timothy Morton’s “being-quake” refers to the deep shock that comes from realizing that nonhuman forces—like climate, ecosystems, or what he calls “hyperobjects”—have their own kind of agency that unsettles our human-centered worldview. And Nikolaj Schultz’s notion of “land sickness” captures the disorientation people feel about their place in the world amid an increasingly uncertain environmental future.
All these terms aim to define a new dimension of the human condition, but Colomina focuses on a specific claim: “Sick architecture is not simply the architecture of emergency. On the contrary, it is the architecture of normality.” With these words, she establishes her stakes immediately. She intends to employ our constructed world as a lens for analyzing our contemporary circumstances. A loss of homeostasis has upended our fabricated habitats, while simultaneously imperiling the planet and its many species.
Our planet and its species now cling to survival; we grapple with some fundamental, if fragile, hopes: that corrosive tribalisms might dissolve, that global temperatures might hold at 1.5 degrees above preindustrial baselines. Yet beneath our ongoing political and environmental crises—themselves symptoms of a totalizing collapse—lie countless smaller domains of distress. Each contains its own fracture, its own exhaustion, its own testimony to what breaks down, and how, and why. These become the book’s tight case studies.
The volume unfolds through four broad categories: Borders, Bodies, Atmospheres, and Landscapes. These function less as taxonomy than as phantasmagoria, overlapping zones of inquiry where illness and infrastructure merge. Dante Furioso’s “Sanitary Imperialism” opens the collection with uncompromising force. The Panama Canal—attempted by France in 1881, abandoned, then resumed in 1904 under Roosevelt’s Isthmian Canal Commission—becomes a story of imperial ambition versus mosquito-borne death. Malaria threatened American engineering from the start. Furioso’s research reveals that the solution was as methodical as it was brutal. Having endured earlier criticism for employing undercompensated Chinese labor on its railroads, the US designed a segregated payroll system that determined housing quality and mosquito protection along racial lines. Inequality encoded as organization.
Not every contribution adheres strictly to clinical definitions of sickness, though one wonders, amid recent upheavals, how we can even claim to know the parameters of what are considered medical maladies. Kara Morgan Plaxa Arxa’s excellent and provocative “Man Caves: Toxic Masculinity Unleashed” captures something genuinely noxious about the suburban troglodyte’s grotto: “Its purgatory location—a house within a house—asserts the belief that men dilute their toxic behaviors and manly alter egos in the presence of women.” The observation points to an unacknowledged pattern threading through these essays: men are nearly always the architects of these cock-ups. Performative machismo may be a lifestyle rather than a disorder, more subreddit (r/Mancaves) than syndrome. But Plaxa Arxa’s essay delivers what the collection demands—etiology and pathogenesis, origins and mechanisms, and an analysis of how sickness spreads.
While the volume covers a broad historical and geographic scope, its emphasis on a European legacy, however justified by the preponderance of colonial atrocities, seems somewhat shortsighted. Indigenous approaches to built environments and their afflictions remain largely absent, a missed opportunity for comparative frameworks beyond the West’s miserable inventory of destruction. Likewise, the connection between the built and the unbuilt here convenes an uncomfortable and unresolved tension. I’ve become increasingly skeptical of using the word “nature”—it seems almost exclusively nostalgic, and representative of a category that pervasive human activity has rendered extinct. Perhaps a similar doubt about sentimental nomenclature explains why the collected essays shy away from explicit condemnation of the causes and effects of the environmental crisis.
Several texts directly explore the lingering environmental consequences of architectural activity intermingled with its unambiguous effect on the human population. Samia Henni examines the 1962 Évian Accords that granted Algeria independence after 132 years of colonization—but which included a clause permitting France to continue secret nuclear operations that had already begun in 1960. She excavates classified materials revealing how France constructed a company town for the facility: housing, electricity, roads, water, all engineered to produce and detonate four nuclear bombs at this clandestine test site. Activity concluded in 1966; the French withdrew. Algerian workers who had built the infrastructure under brutal conditions remained, only later discovering what they had constructed and what it would cost them. Radioactive contamination became an inheritance: bloodstream infections, infertility, cascading physical and psychological damage that persists today, amplified by unremediated concrete bunkers and kilometers of abandoned cable.
Clemens Finkelstein’s contribution, perhaps, goes the furthest in attempting to reconcile the built with the unbuilt, when he writes, “Nature and culture remain precariously intertwined in the twenty-first century and are still crowned by architecture as their environmental mediator.” But Colomina hints at her own, perhaps more precise, investments when identifying the spaces where she believes the instability is most manifest: “All architecture is sick,” she declares, “permanently suspended between resisting and producing disease.” The provocation lands like a plague. It commands the discipline to reckon with itself.
Despair weaves through these pages. The excellent and broad-ranging essays focus more on historical description than on prescribing solutions. Yet I find myself grateful for this massive undertaking. American research institutions face existential threats, but the scholarship gathered here—much of it by students still completing doctorates—suggests that tomorrow’s academics will approach their work as activism. By excavating the archaeology of systemic failure, they map paths toward remedy. The pathologies our extractive governments have inflicted on built environments and the species inhabiting them demand nothing less than this: laborious research before any hope of cure.
Noah Chasin writes on the intersection of human rights and the built environment in twenty-first-century urbanization. He teaches the history and theory of urban design at Columbia University’s GSAPP, where he is also affiliated faculty at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights.