Sick Architecture Book Launch

Join us at e-flux on Friday, November 7, 2025 to celebrate the launch of Sick Architecture, published by MIT Press. Following a presentation of the book by editors Beatriz Colomina, Nick Axel, and Guillermo S. Arsuaga, they will be joined in dialogue by Emily Apter, David Gissen, Brooke Holmes, Francesca Hughes, and Mark Wigley.

Illnesses, wellness, and architecture are inseparable. Medical professionals and architects have always been in a kind of dance, often influencing one another, though the dance is not always synchronized. Drawing from a wide range of historical and contemporary case studies from ancient Greece to twentieth-century India to present-day New York City, Sick Architecture highlights a topic that has shaped our lives from the very beginnings of architecture to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond.

Sick Architecture goes beyond the sicknesses recognized by the medical profession to ask: What aspects of society may be ill, in need of care, or subject to pathologization? Similarly the book goes beyond physical buildings and cities to interrogate architecture’s policy protocols and spatial logics. Its thirty-five diverse essays explore moments in global history when shifting notions of health became vectors for the development of architectural practice and discourse—as well as the reverse, when architecture acted as a reservoir and vector for illness.

Sick Architecture (MIT Press, 2025) is edited by Beatriz Colomina with Nick Axel, Guillermo S. Arsuaga, and e-flux Architecture. Its publication follows the e-flux Architecture series Sick Architecture, and the exhibition “Sick Architecture” at CIVA, Brussels.

Beatriz Colomina is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture at Princeton University. Her books include We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture with Mark Wigley (Lars Müller, 2025), X-Ray Architecture(Lars Müller, 2019), Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design with Mark Wigley (Lars Müller, 2016), Domesticity at War (Actar and MIT, 2007), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (MIT, 1994), and Sexuality and Space(PAP, 1992). She co-curated "We the Bacteria: Toward Biotic Architecture" at the Triennale Milano (2025) with Mark Wigley, and her coedited volumes include Sick Architecture (MIT, 2025), Radical Pedagogies (MIT, 2022), and Clip/Stamp/Fold(Actar, 2010).

Nick Axel is Deputy Editor of e-flux Architecture and the Head of the Architectural Design department at Gerrit Rietveld Academie. He was recently Editor of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, and from 2020–2022, was Curator of Architecture and Chair of the Architectural Advisory Board at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, Kyiv.

Guillermo S. Arsuaga is an architect (ARB, RIBA), tutor in History and Theory Studies and in the HTC MA program at the AA, and a PhD candidate at Princeton University. He was a Mellon-Marron Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and is co-editor of Sick Architecture (MIT, 2025).

Emily Apter is Julius Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University and Chair of the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture. Her books include Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018); Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (Verso, 2013); Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton, 2014), co-edited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood; and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature(Princeton, 2006). Her upcoming book, What is Just Translation?, takes up questions of translation and justice across media.

David Gissen is the author of The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access (2023), and several other books and essays on architecture history and theory. He is the Class of 1972 Professor of Architecture and Director of the PhD program at the Yale School of Architecture.

Brooke Holmes is the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Classics at Princeton University, where she is also Director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism. She is the author of The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece (Princeton, 2010) and Gender: Antiquity and its Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2012). She is currently completing a book entitled Sympathy and the Tissue of the World: Life, Community, and Nature in the Ancient Mediterranean.

Francesca Hughes is the Vincent Scully Visiting Professor in Architectural History at Yale. An architect, educator, and theorist, her work examines architecture’s entanglement with feminist critique, computation, and the history of science and technology. Her current project, Indiscreet Histories of Architecture’s Universal Discrete Machine, explores architecture’s epistemological ties to the long project of computation.

Mark Wigley is a Professor and Dean Emeritus at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. As an architectural theorist and historian, Wigley explores the intersection of architecture, art, philosophy, culture, and technology. He wrote We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture with Beatriz Colomina (Lars Müller, 2025) and Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design with Beatriz Colomina (Lars Müller, 2016) and co-curated “We the Bacteria Notes. Toward Biotic Architecture” (Triennale Milano, 2025), again with Beatriz Colomina.

For more information, please contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.