Beatriz Colomina
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Professor of Architecture; Director, Program in Media and Modernity, Princeton University

Berthold Leibinger Fellow - Class of Fall 2014

Beatriz Colomina is an architectural historian and theorist who studied architecture and completed her PhD at the University of Barcelona. She is Professor of Architecture and Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. Her books include Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (MIT, 1994), which was awarded the 1995 International Book Award by the American Institute of Architects and has been published in nine languages, and Domesticity at War (ACTAR and MIT, 2007). She is the editor of Sexuality and Space (1992), which was awarded the 1993 International Book Award by the American Institute of Architects, Architectureproduction (1988), and Cold War Hot Houses: Inventing Postwar Culture from Cockpit to Playboy, co-edited with AnnMarie Brennan and Jeannie Kim (2004), all with Princeton Architectural Press. A collection of her writings on art and architecture was published as Doble exposición: Arquitectura a través del arte (Akal, 2006). Her most recent book, Manifesto Architecture, was published by Sternberg Press.

 

Colomina has also curated a number of innovative exhibitions. In 2006, she curated, with a team of PhD students from Princeton, the exhibition “Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X,” which opened at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York and has traveled to 12 venues in the USA, Europe, Canada, and Latin America. The catalogue Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X was published by ACTAR (Barcelona) in 2010. Her exhibition “Playboy Architecture: 1953-79,” also developed with a team of PhD students, was at the NAiM/Bureau-Europa in Maastricht (The Netherlands) in 2012 and at the Deutsches Architektur Museum in Frankfurt in 2014. Her most recent exhibition project with PhD students, “Radical Pedagogies: Action, Reaction, Interaction,” was part of the 2014 Venice Biennale of Architecture, where it won a Special Mention Award from the jury.

Project Description

X-ray Architecture

Modern architecture, launched by an international group of avant-garde architects in the 1920s, notes Beatriz Colomina, has usually been understood in terms of functional efficiency, new technologies of construction, and the machine aesthetic. In contrast, the hypothesis of this research is that the architecture of the early twentieth century was shaped by the dominant medical obsession of its time: tuberculosis. Colomina’s project investigates architectural discourse and how it has, from its beginning, associated building and body, the body that it describes is the medical body—a body that is reconstructed by each new theory of health. Avant-garde architects of the early decades of the twentieth century presented their new architecture as a health inducing instrument, a kind of medical equipment for protecting and enhancing the body. Buildings even started to look like X-Rays revealing internal secrets.

Academy Activities

19 Nov 15

X-Ray Architecture

Beatriz Colomina, Professor of Architecture and Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University, discusses how modern architecture, launched by an international group of avant-garde architects in the 1920s, has usually been understood in terms of functional efficiency ...

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