X-Ray Architecture by Beatriz Colomina reframes early twentieth-century modernism through a single provocative thesis: that tuberculosis and the diagnostic X-ray did not merely coincide with modern architecture — they shaped it from the inside out.
About This Book
Colomina's argument is precise and unsettling. Modern architecture's obsession with light, transparency, and hygiene was not aesthetic preference but medical anxiety — a built response to the dominant illness of its era. The X-ray, which made the body's interior visible for the first time, has a structural parallel in the modern building's inversion of public and private space: walls opened up, interiors exposed, the domestic body placed under a kind of architectural surveillance. This is architectural history that operates at the intersection of medical imaging, the body, and spatial theory — essential reading for anyone working in the history and theory of modernism.
Key Features
- 200 pages exploring the intersection of medical discourse and modern architectural theory
- Written by Beatriz Colomina, founding director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University
- Published by Lars Müller Publishers
What You'll Discover
- How tuberculosis as a cultural and medical obsession directly informed the spatial logic and aesthetic priorities of early modernist architects
- The parallel development of X-ray technology and modern architecture, and how both transformed the relationship between interior and exterior, private and public
- The way modern architects positioned their buildings as medical instruments — designed to protect and regulate the body rather than simply shelter it
- Colomina's broader provocation: that dominant anxieties about illness and new techniques of imaging the body continue to condition how architecture is conceived today
About the Author
Beatriz Colomina is founding director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University and a Professor in the School of Architecture. Her scholarship maps the intersections of architecture with art, media, sexuality, and health, establishing her as one of the most influential theorists working across architectural history and cultural studies.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 200
- Dimensions: 240 x 165mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783037784433
- Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architectural historians, theorists, and design students with an interest in the cultural and medical conditions that produced modernism's spatial and aesthetic preoccupations.