In the German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s painting Pegasus above the City from 1837, the post-industrial city  appears to be overwhelmed — “literally lost in a blanket of smoke,” as pointed out by David Gissen.[1] Even though Schinkel was portraying the “new reality” of spatial engagement with pollution and modernity in the fully industrialized English Midlands in the nineteenth century,[2] looking out of one of Bangkok’s skyscraper windows earlier this year would offer not so much of a different atmosphere, except the spires of the factory exhausts are now replaced by glass and concrete towers.

After a few years of dealing with air pollution crisis, as our city’s PM2.5 level was recorded as the world’s third highest, [3] we’ve gotten used to the sight of masked bodies in the streets (or even the absence of bodies, now with the pandemic lockdown). At the time, when just the first cases of the new coronavirus infections had just been known, it seemed more likely that the PM2.5 was going to be the archnemesis of our health and well-being, that forces us, as biopolitical citizens, to reorient living conditions, and as designers, to rethink how air should be manipulated through buildings.

Evidently, the biggest threat to the first quarter of 2020 has been associated with public health — both in the environmental and personal scale. This article questions the implications of “healthy spaces” through air, the notion around natural ventilation and architectural purification schemes in the creation of healthy spaces, and how recent threats have and will shift the way we perceive these spaces.

As architects, we have been trained that in designing “healthy”spaces (in terms of their energy efficiency), there are certain environmental factors to consider and certain strategies to implement. In the G.Z. Brown and Mark DeKay’s canonical guidebook Sun, Wind, & Light: Architectural Design Strategies, which now strangely feels like a nostalgic antiquity, the author wrote, “In simple and beautiful ways, each act of building can serve to heal the relationship between people and the living systems of which we are all a part,” emphasizing the act of designing a building as the act of “healing the environment.” [4]

The notion that “fresh air” had curative effects, though dating back to the 5th century BC,[11]  remains pervasive even in Modern architecture, especially for the treatment of tuberculosis — a respiratory disease with direct association to the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions that followed rapid industrialization and modernization. In her essay, “Strange Bedfellows: Modernism and Tuberculosis,” Margaret Campbell argues that the Modernist’s new prevalent “classless and hygienic lifestyle” was a result of the cross-fertilization between the research and treatment of the disease and the ethos of the Modern movement to integrate aesthetics and social purpose.[12]From urban planning (Howard’s “Garden City”), to sanatoria (Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium) and their flat roofs, verandas, balconies, and chaise lounges (Aalto’s Paimio chair), we have seen attempts in design across different scales to mitigate the illness.

However, the functionalism of these designs has quickly become obsolete, and their modernist architectural features (the flat root, the balcony, the recliner chair) in the attempt to rationalize the pursuit of good health and hygiene have been reduced to merely “lifestyle therapy.”[13]This relationship between the dominant medical discourse of the twentieth century and the formation, representation, and reception of modern architecture was further investigated by Beatriz Colomina in her book X-Ray Architecture,  where she argues that tuberculosis (and the X-ray as the diagnostic tool), indeed, made modern architecture modern [14]— hence, “modernity was driven by illness.”[15]

As contemporaries that evolved in parallel,  the x-ray allows visibility into the body, as a modern building opens its interior to the public, enhancing the body and the psyche of its inhabitants.[16]However, it has been revealed with the introduction of the antibiotic streptomycin as a cure for tuberculosis in 1943, that there was little scientific support for the therapeutic effects of the air and sun in the sanatorium.

The emphasis from architects and public health officials in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the health effects of ventilation had been substantial. Originally developed for moisture control in textile factories and print shops, the first domestic use of air conditioning was believed to be in 1925, when the technology was installed in Mrs. John Kellogg’s bedroom, who had been suffering from asthma.[17]  Towards the 1970s, tightly insulated buildings or “tight buildings” that had a low air exchange rate were controversially referred to as “sick buildings” in the medical literature, engineering and technical publications, and among the general public.[18]

The manipulation of air through a building becomes the principal matter in which architectural decisions were tied to building-related illnesses — thus, the spatialization of health. While the service in which air is handled —  be it filtering outside air, reducing pollen, molds, and mildews, controlling humidity, to providing comfort — becomes capitalized by manufacturers like Frigidaire or Carrier, based on the promise of providing better health.[19]Clean, as in “hypoallergenic,” air is no longer free for all, as the agency shifts in favor of commercialism.

Provoked by preoccupation with absolute functionality and service systems of American architecture at the time, Reyner Banham’s 1965 article, “A Home is Not a House” proposes the ‘anti-house’ where a house can essentially be reduced down to its function of environmental, hence François Dallegret’s illustration of The Environment-Bubble, where a “transparent plastic bubble dome is inflated by merely air-conditioning output” of a car.[20]

This inclination towards mechanical services of the American nation, he argues, was due to the psychological motive from the obsession with the clean.[21]  Likewise, the justifications of air-conditioning were not just about people having to breathe, but also as a cleaning mechanism of the house.[22] In this proposition, the control over air was not merely concerning health, cleanliness, nor capital. Air became a material in which architecture (of the bubble) itself is constructed with, rendering other concrete (literally and figuratively) components useless in creating a controlled environment.

What seemed like a clithromania dream when Buckminster Fuller, together with Shoji Sadao, proposed a two-mile environmentally controlled dome over the island of Manhattan in 1960, no longer feels so nostalgic, when Dubai Holding, in 2014, revealed its plans for what would be the “world’s first temperature-controlled city” and largest shopping mall in the world, Mall of the World, located along Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai.[23]

The 48 million square-foot project argues that it’s temperature-controlled environments (including the world’s largest indoor theme park and an integrated pedestrian city) would establish a year-round leisure destination that would attract 180 million visitors annually and allow tourists to “stay for a week without needing to leave the Mall of the World or use a car.”[24]  This raises the question on the kind of relationship between architecture and air we need today. Is it an environmental control utopia? How do we  mediate air, or see air as a medium through which architecture can be shaped?

References

1. David Gissen, “A Theory of Pollution for Architecture,” in Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture, (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture; Lars-Müller Publishers, 2012), 117.
2. Ibid.
3. Gary Boyle, “Bangkok has world’s third worst air quality,” Bangkok Post, accessed April 1, 2020. https://www. bangkokpost.com/learning/ easy/1831894/bangkok-has- worlds-third-worst-air-quality
4. G.Z. Brown and Mark DeKay, Sun, Wind & Light: Architectural Design Strategies, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001), xiv-xv.
5. Thongthong Chantharangsu, Phratinung Vimanmek, (Bangkok: Thai Military Bank, 1983), 80.
6. Naengnoi Suksri, Palaces of Bangkok: Royal Residences of the Chakri Dynasty, (Bangkok: Asia Books, 1996), 200.
7. Ibid., 198.
8. Chantharangsu, Vimanmek, 81.
9. Although the autoimmune disease affects mainly the joints, rheumatoid arthritis can also have respiratory complications.
10. Suksri, Palaces, 143.
11. Margaret Campbell, “Strange Bedfellows: Modernism and Tuberculosis,” in Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture, (Montreal: Canadian Centre for
12. Architecture; Lars-Müller Publishers, 2012), 133.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.,149.
15. Beatriz Colomina, X-Ray Architecture, (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2019), 63.
16. Ibid., 11.
17. Ibid., 10.
18. Carla C. Keirns, “Allergic Landscapes, Built Environments and Human Health,” in Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture, (Montreal: Canadian Centre for
19. Architecture; Lars-Müller Publishers, 2012), 105.
20. Ibid., 108.
21. Ibid., 105.
22. Reyner Banham, “A home is Not a House,” Art in America, Volume 2 (1965): 70-79.
23. Ibid., 73.
24. Ibid.
25. Cleofe Maceda, “Dubai’s Mall of the World to be built in 10 years,” Gulf News, accessed April 1, 2020. https:// gulfnews.com/business/ dubais-mall-of-the-world-to- be-built-in-10-years-1.1357950 A fragment of this not-so- distant future vision was expected to be completed before the Dubai Expo 2020 this year.
    “Mall of the World Guide,” Propsearch.ae, accessed April 1, 2020. https://propsearch.ae/dubai/mall-of-the-worl