X-Ray Architecture explores the enormous effect of medical discourse and imaging innovations on the development, representation and reception of twentieth-century architecture. It challenges the typical understanding of modern-day architecture by proposing that it was formed by the dominant medical fascination of its time: tuberculosis and its main diagnostic tool, the X-ray. Modern architecture and the X-ray were born around the very same time and developed in parallel. While the X-ray exposed the inside of the body to the general public eye, the contemporary structure revealed its interior, considerably inverting the relationship between personal and public. Architects presented their buildings as a type of medical instrument for securing and enhancing the body and psyche. Beatriz Colomina traces the psychopathologies of twentieth-century architecture– from the injury of tuberculosis to more current conditions such as burn-out syndrome and ADHD– and the huge changes of personal privacy and publicity prompted by diagnostic tools from X-Rays to MRIs and beyond. She recommends that if we wish to speak about the state of architecture today, we should want to the dominant fascinations with illness and the latest methods of imaging the body– and ask what effects they have on the method we conceive architecture.– Publisher’s website.
No comments:
Post a Comment