Form Follows Fever

Form Follows Fever is the first in-depth account of the turbulent years of initial urban settlement and growth of colonial Hong Kong across the 1840s. During this period, the island gained a terrible reputation as a diseased and deadly location…….

Christopher Cowell is an urban historian, author, and architect. He trained in architectural history at Columbia University and history at the University of Hong Kong. He now lectures at London South Bank University. Cowell’s writing examines the relationship between the practice and theory of architecture and urbanism against the cultural complexity of colonialism. He is the author of Form Follows Fever: Malaria and the Construction of Hong Kong, 1841–1849 (CUHKP, 2024), a book that explores the early history of the settlement’s colonisation and its relationship with miasma theory. He is now working on a second book on Company India and its system of military cantonments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He recently won the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain’s coveted Hawksmoor Medal in 2024 for his work on hill stations in northern India.