Bianchetti_Bodies.-Between-Space-and-Desi_9783868599497

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THE SICK BODY
The body is fragile; it falls sick. Design tackles this fragility, as it (for example)
did tuberculosis in the early twentieth century: the algid example of Paimo’s
sanatorium, perhaps the most famous example, remains a place of pilgrimage
for those who wish to understand the Finnish humanisation of modernism. 39
A hundred years earlier in the nineteenth century, cholera broke out in a
world already globalised by the movement of military troops and goods—one
in which epidemics not only caused the death of hundreds of thousands,
but also changed the structure of society. Changes in the structure of society
led to countless religious and pagan rites. At the time, hygienists, doctors,
and engineers undid and redid the city in a titanic effort to fight this illness
(which was tackled on another front by John Snow, Filippo Pacini, and Robert
Koch)—but not without accurately describing the conditions. 40 Cholera is
an illness that wounds, mutilates, lacerates, and ultimately kills the body. The
sick body becomes an unfamiliar, foreign body to be segregated and hidden.
The violent intrusion of the illness into the individual and social body merges
with the malignancy that leads to death. The sick body is a threatening body,
cared for through segregation: leper colonies, cordons sanitaires, militarisation
(even if the military is the primary vector of disease transmission); self-defence
groups ready to ward off foreigners, strangers, and vagabonds. At the
end of the nineteenth century, medical surveys rewrote urban space based on
the sick body. 41
In the introduction to her most recent study, Beatriz Colomina writes that
“modernity was driven by illness”. 42 The engine of modern architecture
was not a heroic, shiny, functional machine, but “a languid fragile body
suspended outside daily life in a protective cocoon of new technologies
and geometries”. 43 Colomina encourages us to consider the intimate link
between space and illness and imagine all the actors involved as patients:
architects, clients, theorists, critics, and workers. What does it mean to make
the sick (body) the key focus of design? This question is still pertinent today,
given the current situation in which the body is wounded and deformed
by new illnesses; obesity, Alzheimer’s, cardiac diseases, solitude, and frustrations
that maintain opaque and superimposed boundaries with clinical
depression. These illnesses continue to inspire design ideas from therapeutic
design to stress researchers. 44 Design’s task is always to fight illness, anxiety,
existential disorientation, and malaise, and to explain the ways that space
helps to generate or reduce damage to the body and psyche. “A city is good
if it counteracts social stress”. 45 This approach is called Neuro-Urbanism, a