Architecture and Ideology

Dr RUŽICA BOŽOVIĆ STAMENOVIĆ, Associate Professor
Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade, ruzicabozovic@arh.bg.ac.rs
HEALTH AND ARCHITECTURE
FROM SERVING IDEOLOGIES TO BECOMING IDEOLOGY – THE CASE OF OUROBOROS
Abstract |
Health is an important personal and social asset defined by World Health Organization as
reaching beyond absence of illness or infirmity and implying complete physical, social and
psychological wellbeing. In theory and practice of the 20th century architecture the diverse
interpretations of health range from explicit sanitation issues to implicit philosophical readings.
Main objective in this discourse is to trace the roots of the ideological lining in some of these
constructs with focus on two areas – hospital design and housing. The historic overview
starting in ancient times, points to the presence of a consistent ideological component in
various spatial interpretations of health including the recently prevailing wellbeing paradigm. In
modernism, the role of health limited to sanitation and extensive legislation was to help
establish and manifest “power over’ the space. The subsequent technocratic environmentalism
addressed issues of healthy spaces with energy consumption and financial returns as core
objectives. Likewise, the recent salutogenic approach to designing healing places conceals the
commodification of health and imminent manipulation. New tendencies in design of both
hospitals and housing transcend limitations of modernism and embrace hapticity while
reinstalling material imagination in the process. Yet, the ideological influence of biopolitics on
this salutogenic design and resurrection of normativeness through Evidence Based Design calls
for overdue insurgency against hypocrisy and concealed ideological aims in addressing health
in architecture.
Key words |
health, ideology, architecture, wellbeing, holistic, housing
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