Design and Disease: New Typologies

This seminar focuses on the complex intersection between design and disease. There is a particular kind of reciprocity between public health and public space that shaped the modern and contemporary city. This seminar approaches the history of design, architecture, and technology through a close reading of select models of architecture, propositions for cities, infrastructures, and manifestos. It aims to encourage students to reflect upon innovative building types and unusual design objects, such as hospitals, sanatoriums, rehabilitation centers, research facilities, teen centers, homeless shelters, and health clinics that developed out of the urgency of urban health crises—from disease to war—from the 1850s to the present. Each session is devoted to an in-depth study of an architect and paradigms of the intertwining of health, architecture, technology, social theories, culture, and urbanism. Architects explored include Le Corbusier, Alison and Peter Smithson, Archigram, Louis Kahn, Tecton, Otto Wagner, Alvar Aalto, Buckminster Fuller, Jane Drew, Gustav Peichl, Erich Mendelsohn, and contemporaries such as Rem Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron. Students are expected make a short visual presentation and develop an original semester-long project that assumes the form either of a design project or of a research paper. Limited enrollment.