Join Head Hi for a double book launch embracing responses to illness and organisms with authors Guillermo S. Arsuaga, Beatriz Colomina, Ivan Lopez Munuera, and Mark Wigley who will discuss their recently released books probing sickness and bacteria’s symbiosis with architecture.

More about the books:

Sick Architecture highlights a theme that has shaped life from the very beginnings of architecture to the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. Architects and doctors have always been entangled, influencing one another, though not always in sync. Drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary case studies, this book extends beyond sicknesses recognized by the medical profession to ask: What aspects of society may be ill, in need of care, or subject to pathologization? Likewise, it looks beyond buildings and cities to interrogate architecture’s policies, protocols, and spatial logics. With thirty-five diverse essays, Sick Architecture traces moments in global history when shifting notions of health became vectors for architectural practice and discourse—and when, conversely, architecture itself functioned as a reservoir and vector of illness.

We the Bacteria explores the intimate entanglements of the microbes within bodies and buildings over the last 10,000 years, culminating in the antibiotic philosophy of contemporary architecture. The diseases of our time are diseases of the built environment. The deadly combination of rapidly declining microbial diversity and rising antibiotic-resistant bacteria is as great a threat as climate change. Hostility to bacteria has to give way to new forms of hospitality from a more symbiotic architecture that learns from bacteria, embracing them and reconnecting with soil, plants and other species. Buildings based on fear of bacteria, which is to say fear of life itself, must give way to buildings learning from models of coexistence based on bacteria themselves. Colomina and Wigley draw on the latest research into microbes to rethink the past and possible futures of the built environment.

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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). @gsarsuaga

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).

Ivan Lopez Munuera is a New York-based scholar, critic, and curator working at the intersection of culture, technology, politics, and bodily practices in the modern period and on the global stage. He is an Assistant Professor at Bard College; and his research has been generously sponsored by PIIRS (Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies) and CCA (Canadian Centre for Architecture). In 2020, Munuera was awarded the Harold W. Dodds Fellowship at Princeton University. This fellowship recognizes scholars displaying the highest academic excellence and professional promise. Munuera has presented his work at various conferences and academic forums and published widely. @ivanlmunuera

Mark Wigley is Professor of Architecture and Dean Emeritus at Columbia University. He is a historian, theorist, and critic who explores the intersection of architecture, art, philosophy, culture, and technology. His recent books include: We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture (with Beatriz Colomina), Konrad Wachsmann’s Television: Post-Architectural Transmissions; Passing Through Architecture: The 10 Years of Gordon Matta-Clark; Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation; Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (with Beatriz Colomina); and Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio. He has curated exhibitions at MoMA, The Drawing Center, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Het Nieuwe Instituut, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, and the Milan Triennale. @wig56

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