Sick Architecture

Beatriz Colomina, Nick Axel, Guillermo S. Arsuaga and Mark Wigley with Silvana Taher.

Illness, wellness, and architecture are inseparable. Join us for the London launch of Sick Architecture, a thought-provoking essay collection about how architecture and sickness are interwoven—from ancient Greece to present-day New York City. Editors Beatriz Colomina, Nick Axel, and Guillermo S. Arsuaga will present the project. They will be joined by Mark Wigley, who will present the new book We the Bacteria. The event will be introduced by Ingrid Schroder and the conversation will be chaired by Silvana Taher.

Architects and medical professionals have always been in a kind of dance, influencing one another, though not always in sync. Drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary case studies, Sick Architecture highlights a theme that has shaped life from the very beginnings of architecture to the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. The book extends beyond sicknesses recognized by the medical profession to ask: What aspects of society may be ill, in need of care, or subject to pathologization?Likewise, it looks beyond buildings and cities to interrogate architecture’s policies, protocols, and spatial logics. With thirty-five diverse essays, Sick Architecture traces moments in global history when shifting notions of health became vectors for architectural practice and discourse—and when, conversely, architecture itself functioned as a reservoir and vector of illness.

We the Bacteria explores the intimate entanglements of the microbes within bodies and buildings over the last 10,000 years, culminating in the antibiotic philosophy of contemporary architecture. The diseases of our time are diseases of the built environment. The deadly combination of rapidly declining microbial diversity and rising antibiotic-resistant bacteria is as great a threat as climate change. Hostility to bacteria has to give way to new forms of hospitality from a more symbiotic architecture that learns from bacteria, embracing them and reconnecting with soil, plants and other species. Buildings based on fear of bacteria, which is to say fear of life itself, must give way to buildings learning from models of coexistence based on bacteria themselves. Colomina and Wigley draw on the latest research into microbes to rethink the past and possible futures of the built environment.



BEATRIZ COLOMINA is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture at Princeton University. Her books include We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture with Mark Wigley (Lars Müller, 2025), X-Ray Architecture (Lars Müller, 2019), Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design with Mark Wigley (Lars Müller, 2016), Domesticity at War (Actar and MIT, 2007), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (MIT, 1994), and Sexuality and Space (PAP, 1992). She co-curated We the Bacteria: Toward Biotic Architecture at the Triennale Milano (2025) with Mark Wigley, and her coedited volumes include Sick Architecture (MIT, 2025), Radical Pedagogies (MIT, 2022), and Clip/Stamp/Fold (Actar, 2010).

Nick Axel is Deputy Editor of e-flux Architecture and the Head of the Architectural Design department at Gerrit Rietveld Academie. He was recently Editor of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, and from 2020–2022, was Curator of Architecture and Chair of the Architectural Advisory Board at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, Kyiv.

GUILLERMO S. ARSUAGA is an architect (ARB, RIBA), tutor in History and Theory Studies and in the HTC MA program at the AA, and a PhD candidate at Princeton University. He was a Mellon-Marron Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and is co-editor of Sick Architecture (MIT, 2025).


MARK WIGLEY is a Professor and Dean Emeritus at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. As an architectural theorist and historian, Wigley explores the intersection of architecture, art, philosophy, culture, and technology. He wrote We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture with Beatriz Colomina (Lars Müller, 2025) and Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design with Beatriz Colomina (Lars Müller, 2016) and co-curated “We the Bacteria Notes. Toward Biotic Architecture” (Triennale Milano, 2025), again with Beatriz Colomina.