Architecture Was Never Only a Human Project

Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley reread architectural history through microorganisms. Their argument is that the built environment has never been produced by humans alone. A building is not a shell but an environment that houses bacteria, fungi and mould and changes alongside them. The reading extends their earlier work on modern architecture's relationship with disease, particularly tuberculosis.

Modernism's founding rhetoric was hygienic: the white wall, the flat surface, the wide window and cross ventilation all arrived with a promise of an interior cleared of germs, and sanatoria were designed as medical and architectural programmes at once. The point Colomina and Wigley press is that the promise was misstated from the start, because the microbe was already inside. That has technical consequences now. As envelopes have tightened for energy performance, humidity and microbial load indoors have become problems handed over to mechanical systems. Deciding which organisms to live with turns into a design criterion rather than a metaphor.