: Sir Peter Cook, Alison Brooks, Beatriz Colomina, Sean Godsell, Adam Peacock
: Anna Petrou, Brittany Weidemann, Harrison Brooks
: Inflection 06: Originals Journal of the Melbourne School of Design
: AADR - Art Architecture Design Research
: 9783887789121
: 1
: CHF 13.50
:
: Architektur
: English
: 123
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Architects are expected to create original ideas resulting in a unique, bespoke design. With the rise of Modern Architecture, originality became ingrained in perceptions of good design. As a result, originality has become a barometer against which we measure the value of design. However technology today allows for ease of replication and copies, thus originality in design has become an ostensibly hollow prospect. Originals gathers a wide range of responses, varied in their opinions and approaches to originality and authorship in design and architecture. Inflection is a student-run design journal based at the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne. Born from a desire to stimulate debate and generate ideas, it advocates the discursive voice of students, academics and practitioners. Founded in 2013, Inflection is a home for provocative writing-a place to share ideas and engage with contemporary discourse.

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 bookX-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. H