Archforum

The publication of NYRA #45 marks the fifth anniversary of an event most of us would rather forget. Declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020, the coronavirus long ago shed its nominal novelty. Last August, CDC officials reclassified the virus as “endemic”—an invisible, inexorable part of life and death in America.

Yet Covid continues to infect the insalubrious atmosphere of US politics. In the waning hours of his presidency, Joe Biden preemptively pardoned Anthony Fauci—a way of shielding his chief medical adviser from vindictive deep-state realists in the forthcoming administration. Days after Trump recamped to the White House, the CIA reversed its position on the lab leak theory and the military moved to reinstate servicepeople discharged for refusing the vaccine. With RFK Jr. presiding over the Department of Health and Human Services, skepticism has ousted expert consensus. Many are moved to concern, far fewer to political organization.

It is increasingly difficult to recall the urgency that defined those addled lockdown days half a decade ago. To conjure the everywhere-at-once-ness of the threat, when the logistics of its transmission were so little understood and epidemiology looked, evanescently, like metaphysics. Also difficult to retrieve is the optimism underpinning the turn toward “care” in political and cultural discourse, from diurnal rituals of appreciation for frontline workers to dedicated symposia and exhibitions (the word curator, we were often reminded, derives from cura, Latin for care) to a proposal to establish a Department of Care in New York City. Against the safe-care quackery propagated on YouTube and the small-business necropolitics of the antilockdown movement, this solidaristic rhetoric mobilized feminist theories of social reproduction to expose the decrepitude of our health and welfare systems and the asymmetrical risk borne by waged and unwaged caregivers alike. Yet even as it unmasked capitalism’s dependence on the exploited and the vulnerable, the language of care was itself vulnerable to cooptation, enlisted in the valorization of sentiment and self-sacrifice over public policy and redistributive justice. (The ironies of Covid are too many and too black to enumerate here, though it bears mentioning that the care ethic ascended in the academies of art and design as the campaign for Medicare for All was being abandoned.) Seeking to avoid the ministrations of melancholia, we asked respondents to reflect on care-driven practices, in architecture and beyond, postpandemic. What role can criticism play in refining political strategy, and what wisdom can be called upon in the plagues of the future?

Covid-19 forcefully demonstrated the physicality of our collective body: Health is communal, immunity is shared, and bodies need caring for. Yet practices of care exceed the requirements of material survival. As feminist theorists Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto argue, care is a “species act” that entangles our bodies with more-than-human worlds, enabling us to flourish together.

Alongside the ground-up networks of mutual aid that emerge from social relations, we also create political and civic institutions that formalize, make visible, and safeguard social relations in turn. These infrastructures of care range from the material—for instance, the everyday physical spaces of schools and public parks—to the immaterial—organizing and activism that influence policy to protect a community, workers, a watershed, even the air we breathe.

In one sense, caring practices are political in that the actions of a state can profoundly affect the well-being of an individual. On the other hand, caring practices precede and ultimately structure political life. Fundamentally, they are concerned with coexistence and how the relations, mechanics, and frictions of coexistence create new worlds.

Yet today, as we witness the political dismantling of the state’s institutions, their underlying fragility is laid bare. It is at this moment that caring infrastructures become critical, reminding us that social power derives not from the state or the market but through solidarity. Even when institutions are unmade, the intrinsic bonds between communities persist. Indeed, when certain bodies, forms of existence, and relationships to the land are forbidden, then the everyday routines of mutual aid become acts of resistance. In this sense, the “species act” of care is tied as much to strategies for collective action as to the production, reproduction, and maintenance of life.

While architecture’s specific forms of agency may seem peripheral to this widespread dismantling of our social infrastructures, design can serve as a tool to counter the cruel outcomes of partisan politics. Architects must practice in ways that acknowledge that bodies are ever more precarious, that land is not empty, that materials and labor are not free, and that the experience of climate collapse is brutally uneven. From the design of a hospital bed to the breathability of a façade to the reform of a supply chain, such caring and careful architectures tie the body to the collective condition of the planetary. If acts of design fall somewhere between the material and the immaterial, then our agency as architects rests in our ability to imagine—and eventually construct—new forms of life together. —BRITTANY UTTING, ARCHITECTURAL DESIGNER

I moved back to New York after four years away on January 2, 2021. Because, I told myself, I missed my family and friends. Because, I told myself, here in my hometown, I always felt like the opposite of a fish out of water—a fish in water.

In New Orleans, where I’d spent the early days of the pandemic, people had their own houses, their own yards. They remained socially distant because they could. This was undoubtedly the correct stance to take public health-wise, but without people, without partying, with my social life confined to backyard hangs of two or three people having a beer or two, I sensed, essentially, that I had a very short time remaining before I went insane. And so this is the real reason I moved back to New York. Because it was more dangerous. Because I needed to be around bodies. Touch their sweat. Be one of many fish, wet.

Socializing in this way comes with risk, and yet it is the only way I know how to live a life worth living—one in which I feel sufficiently connected to humanity to keep my heart humming.

And so, that, in those early days back in New York, is what I did—dangerous things. Parties under the Kosciuszko Bridge with heads and noses and mouths too close to each other; parties on rooftops in 40-degree weather that inevitably transitioned into parties inside apartments; walks with surreptitious whiskey, over the Williamsburg Bridge and through the East Village, that inevitably transitioned into parties inside apartments.

I knew this was bad. I knew people got sick. I knew I could not stop.

That is the thing: Living a queer life, or at least a good one, requires danger. Or at least, in America’s current construction, requires danger. Covid was a reminder of this, but it has always been true—AIDS, drug addiction and death, things people do with each other to stay alive made dangerous by a government’s neglect.

We, individually, are compelled to figure out what is more dangerous: to be together or to be alone.

Social isolation, for me at least (and seemingly for many, many others too), is not a tenable solution to social sickness. It is equally, if not more (for me at least), treacherous.

I want the world to be safer. I want it to be fun. It should be both. On this we should not compromise. There is no compromise to be made. We should have, we indeed need, both. Safety and sweat. A fish out of water, after all, is a dead fish. —P. E. MOSKOWITZ, WRITER

The state of caring for a helpless infant is a special one: Constant, undivided attention and a thoughtless, self-sacrificing vigilance characterize the psychology of the primary caretaker in the earliest hours, days, and weeks of a child’s life. It is a necessity of biology that caring takes this form because human beings are born into the world in a state of unique helplessness. Everyone who has cared for a newborn understands the dangerous wobbliness of a baby’s head and the need to cradle it in one’s arms and hands. The stiffening of the spine is the first sign of infantile autonomy and is an occasion for celebration and the first step of many to imperfect forms of independence.

The vernacular use of the verb “to care about” in American English is completely debased by not-for-profit organizations that want to raise money through a flash of outrage that generates a fake sense of urgency. Don’t you “care” about the environment? Don’t you “care” about gun control? These are complex political issues about which my caring or not really is a matter of total irrelevance.

In the world of white-collar wage-workers, a general sense of indifference to the quality of our language, and our mastery of history and argument, leads to a desperate clinging to shortcuts in decision-making at every level. Social media and artificial intelligence are only two symptoms of our inability to look more deeply at problems, small and large.

There is a category of human worker who lives in a state of heightened vigilance with regard to something American elites, liberal and conservative, do not really care about at all: beauty. We used to call these people artists, no matter what medium they worked in, but now we call them content producers.

Beauty is not a baby. Babies can be beautiful. But beauty is a category that exceeds self-interest, self-expression, and self-aggrandizement. Beauty is abstract and terrifying. The film The Brutalist tried to get at the existence of a human being whose life and work could not be separated from a mute devotion to beauty. There is a beauty to reasoned argument: Its scaffolding is like an architectural construction, unadorned and unsparing in its obedience to the laws of physics and grammar. A political commitment to justice and beauty demands maturity and respect for the twisted materials of human labor. It demands respect for the inherited tradition of linguistic, social, cultural, and philosophical achievement. Caring is for babies and should be reserved for those who deserve our undivided attentions. Exploitation and oppression demand maturity and sometimes restraint.

American elites are so degraded by shortcuts to outrage that they believe no arguments are needed to persuade others of the justness of their causes. They think all they need to do is shout “Fascist!” or “Woketard” and we will fall in line with their facile denunciations. Outrage propaganda works for a moment, but it leads to nothing more than the mystification of affect. Inequality and exploitation are not categories in a melodrama, to be resolved by tears of virtue. The ugliness, dishonesty, and tyranny in our world require a sustained, martial, uncompromising, and organized antagonism, stripped of fantasies of liberal and conservative infantilism. —CATHERINE LIU, CULTURAL THEORIST

Since the pandemic, I’ve felt as though life has become unhinged in a way that is hard to put a finger on. Patients are caught in spirals of anxiety and morbid thoughts about the future, with no exit. I understand what it means to be in rut. This feels different and differently collective, as if we were all spinning in the same vacuum. We charge ahead with our personal and professional pursuits with abandon, while wearing ourselves down and fighting a feeling of the meaninglessness of it all. Political debates feel violent, locked into messy tribalism with little that resembles dialogue or the stepwise unfolding of perspectives. How can we even begin to care?

We tend to forget that we’re breathing. During the pandemic, this forgetfulness became untenable, as breath, the vector of that plague, was driven from background to foreground. I can’t help but notice the turmoil that seemed to arrive at the very moment that breathing was thrown into question—not just the effect of coronavirus on the lungs, but the political situation in the United States, our asphyxiating history of racism and police violence, climate catastrophe, all amid renewed international wars. It’s as if the body and environmental threats were directly translated into the political arena and made explicit.

It wasn’t only breathing but also social conditions that the pandemic brought crashing to the fore. Never had we been forced to confront the stark opposition between the pursuit of individual freedom as America has so gloriously and so vainly defined it and the reality of nine billion inhabitants living and breathing in a shared atmosphere. As our breath became harmful to the Other, restriction became the essence of collective care. Maybe it was always the essence? If the pandemic has undone something, then perhaps it is our feeling of being bound together by a human project. The philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy called coronavirus a “communovirus,” pointing to the communal aspects of life unearthed by the pandemic, along with an ironic nod to the renewed fears of China. Even as it showed us as equal participants, we understood that we are not all equal in our privileges when it comes to life and death— just as, even outside of times of pandemic, we aren’t equal when it comes to the air we breathe.

So many public intellectuals hoped that the break produced by the virus would lead to new forms of consciousness, only to have their spirits dashed by the brutal New Normal that followed in its wake. Economic forces cashed in on our all-too-human fear that spread as quickly as new variants. The communovirus didn’t make us more communal; it seemingly made us less so. Less likely to care for one another and more focused on protecting our own.

My most powerful memories of the pandemic are from the long hours I spent in the Intensive Care Unit during the first wave. Often, I was facilitating painful, one-way conversations between loved ones and their intubated family member that they could not visit. The survival odds for an intubated patient during the first wave were slim. These patients were likely going to die.

One day at the ICU I helped a man see his father on a ventilator using WhatsApp on my phone since he couldn’t figure out how to use the Zoom system on the hospital tablets. The son was in Haiti. He had been told his father was “crashing,” meaning his lungs were giving out. It is a word I heard constantly. Computers crash, stock markets crash, cars crash. Now lungs were crashing too.

The sound wasn’t working on my phone, but his father was in a medically induced coma, so the man said it didn’t matter to him—he just wanted to see him. The internet connection wouldn’t hold the video call for more than fifteen seconds, so we figured out quickly that he could just call back and I would flip the camera each time so he could see his father. We did this a dozen times before he called me and said, “OK, that’s enough.” It was a moment of strange and unexpected intimacy: not merely being present at this moment but seeing him seeing his father on the double screen of these internet video calls.

The intensive care units were makeshift wards crafted out of corrugated plastic barriers, separated from the main areas of the hospital by interim stations where you could put on or take off your personal protective equipment. For a time, I didn’t think about the risks. Until I saw too many people expire before my eyes and I started to imagine the infection on my hands, my phone, my shoes. All the moments of failing to wash properly. The reality of death finally got to me. And it cracked a façade where I had been willing to continue working as a volunteer in a hospital that certainly was not simply or only a humanitarian enterprise. It was a business that willingly jeopardized its workers, no less its volunteers.

Who can forget those quasi-experimental scenes of a person sneezing or coughing and the neon green cloud of microparticles wafting out of their faces hundreds of feet. They seemed endlessly repeated on the news in those first months, especially as the question of mandatory masking laws were debated with ferocity. The hospital was covered in masking tape that was green, red, yellow to demarcate areas with different risk levels. Of course, given how germs travel, none of this partitioning made a huge amount of sense (though it must be said, I never got sick once in all those months of working), but as with traffic lights, which don’t necessarily reduce accidents, the real purpose of this system was to give us a semblance of order and safety, important in this scenario where staff also fell sick and died.

We worked in silence in the ICU. It was an unspoken rule that if you wanted to converse you went back into the hallway areas. Who was this rule for? The patients wouldn’t have been disturbed by the sounds of talking. Was it like holding your breath when you pass by a cemetery? The intensive care nurses—a special breed—seemed to float as they tended to the bodies, moving from bed to bed. It almost felt like we were all already dead. Weirdly I found peace in the ICU. “To pray is to breathe,” says Kierkegaard. For the first time in my life, I prayed, not for myself but for these people, reduced to bodies, living by machines.
—JAMIESON WEBSTER, PSYCHOANALYST

Copyright © 2025 by Jamieson Webster. Excerpted from On Breathing. Reprinted by permission of Catapult.

Shot in the waning days of 2020, a short home video shows my friend Akua in the final stages of birthing her son, Quincy. It bears witness to this profound and intimate moment in a manner that respects the intensity of her experience. Her weary, heavy body leans over a sofa and into the comforting counterweight. The sturdy domestic form provides support during the seconds between contractions as she collects her breath and girds herself for the next wave. She’s nearing the end of a long labor—her first—and she’s almost at the finish line. She grips the backrest and utters a guttural groan. As the sound crescendos in her throat she pushes her baby into an uncertain world made softer by her choice to give birth in a place where she felt safe and supported.

Akua was one of a small but significant group of birthing people in the United States during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic who chose to bypass the hospital (where 99 percent of deliveries occur in this country) to bring birth home (where 99 percent of people were born prior to the rise of the maternity ward and modern medicine in the early twentieth century). Doing so not only avoided medical institutions rife with a terrifying virus but meant ensuring the presence of birthing partners at a moment when hospitals had to turn them away. Such support, studies have shown, can reduce interventions like cesareans by up to 40 percent.

This movement toward the domestic also occurred during a moment of racial reckoning that brought into sharp focus the dire maternal and infant health outcomes for birthing people of color and their babies in established medical systems in the US. It’s a story that has been decades in the making. If you have a spare hour, log on to the Library of Congress’s film portal and watch the beautiful homage to Italian neorealist cinema All My Babies: A Midwife’s Own Story, which follows an expert birth attendant, Mary Frances Coley, in Georgia in the mid-1950s. Commissioned by the state’s public health department and intended as a teaching aid for midwives, All My Babies records the enforced deference and determined resistance of Black midwives interacting with White doctors and nurses under Jim Crow. It also portends the loss of Black midwifery expertise, which supported poor and rural pregnant women of all races throughout the American South. Marginalized by the racist and racialized structures of industrialized medicine in the twentieth century, this birth knowledge is now being actively recuperated by BIPOC birth workers and birthing people in the present. Birth choice, including home birth, is part of this movement.

Modern hospitals can be marvels, too. I gave birth to my daughter in one five years after Akua birthed Quincy, and my life and that of my baby were made immeasurably safer, because I had been diagnosed with preeclampsia while in labor. I needed the IVs, the induction, and the intervention. Akua’s choice to give birth at home enabled her to birth with dignity. A suburban hospital afforded me the same.

In birth, total control is an illusion, but informed consent and choice can empower. Birthing at home isn’t always an easy choice. Most insurance companies don’t cover such deliveries, and it can be hard to find medical practitioners who attend home births, due to complex insurance requirements. Uncomplicated, low-tech home births are cheaper and thus pay at-home health providers less, too (and they make hospitals precisely zero dollars). And for birthing people, including Akua, even the modest fees that midwives charge to ensure safety and care in this environment are significant out-of-pocket costs.

One bright spot that has changed in the few years since the pandemic is that the state where both Akua and I live, Rhode Island, now mandates that state insurance companies cover fifteen hours of doula support at home or in the hospital, a critical architecture of care that doulas themselves helped fight for. My own experience of having a postpartum doula was life-changing. Akua is a doula and enacts this transformative care work daily.

Care-driven practices related to birth have remained fairly immutable over time and rest upon listening to and trusting birthing people and their babies. The architecture of hospital maternity wards make sense for some; for others—especially during the Covid-19 pandemic and through ongoing medical and social assaults on equity—the shelter of their own home is the right place to be. Laboring or being cared for by a postpartum doula in the domestic space brings us back to histories of care that prioritize mutual aid and culturally appropriate knowledge. Access to these strategies can help us meet the plagues of the future, some of which have already begun, wherever we are born and wherever we live. — MICHELLE MILLAR FISHER, CURATOR

One of the central questions I take on in my latest book, Lifehouse (Verso, 2024), has divided the finest minds of the left ever since the days of the First International: Is the state the most appropriate vehicle for the distribution of care? Admittedly, the present moment has drained the issue of its urgency such that we might wonder if the state is interested in caring for us at all.

The current executive is determined to blow the administrative state to bits along with whatever capacity to deliver care it may once have possessed. If for no other reason than collective self-preservation, then, it falls to us to consider what it is we can do to care for ourselves.

That means weighing more carefully than ever what it is we mean when we say “care.” Just as a critical and philosophically sophisticated bioregionalism came to be watered down by popular discourse until it resembled little more than a cozy liberal vision of place, so too has a robust body of feminist thought been progressively stripped back with the result that very little survives beyond the insight that care involves the mobilization of affect. And even this gets reduced into a near tautology: We are roused to care for the things we care about.

I’m moved to paraphrase, of all things, Hannibal Lecter’s counsel to Clarice Starling, regarding “the first and principal” quality of the challenge confronting her. What sets the mobilization of affect in motion? We begin by caring about what we see every day. We begin, in other words, where we are: in the streets of our own neighborhood, in the few hundred steps from our front door to the subway stop or corner. Whether as sources of dread or frustration or the fiercest kind of pride, these are among the circumstances that are most charged with meaning for us.

And I think there’s an important indicator in this as to what shape our response to the situation ought to take. The ambit of the care work we must now take up is narrow but deep, intensive before it is extensive. Many of us have relatively recent experience with this kind of work, dating to the most trying months of the Covid lockdown. One of the things that was unintentionally clarifying about that time was how it redrew our maps: Unless you yourself were among the “essential workers” compelled to risk your own health in maintaining some semblance of normal institutional function, you generally couldn’t organize the distribution of food or meds on the other side of the city. You did that work where you were, where the need was, in your own backyard. Ironically, I’ve learned that this can be a hard thing for people coming from climate activism, in particular, to wrap their heads around. The logic of mitigation has gotten them so accustomed to a global canvas that they tend to overlook how much of the work of adaptation can, and in fact needs to be, done in the streets around them. Folks who are not in the slightest fazed by the prospect of facing down the body-armored security cordons around a conference of the parties or shareholders’ meeting quail at the thought of knocking on their neighbors’ doors.

Maybe, if pressed, they’ll admit to thinking of “activism” as something that happens in other quarters of their city. So while the most effective steps most of us can take to address the emerging reality of climate-system chaos involve organizing the psychic and material necessities of survival in our own communities, it will take time for some people to understand this—and time is just what we do not have in abundance. Those of us who are clear on what is required will therefore have to help others get to that clarity, gently and with respect, but with whatever means are at our disposal.

None of this is to indulge the sentimentality that can so often color discussions of “the local.” I’m always reminded that during the Bosnian war—to take just one pungent example, among the many available—it was your neighbors who’d turf you out, march you down to the riverside to have your throat slit, and move straight into the house you’d built by hand, which they’d coveted from next door for so many years. Honesty compels those of us who advocate for this sort of active care work to acknowledge that every new relationship we open ourselves to is also a vector of possible threat, that this is never truer than in the places we feel safest—and that this goes tenfold for people who are in any way vulnerable. Asking people to open themselves to that is asking a great deal.

In the retreat of the state, in the organized abandonment of vulnerable communities, in the perversely deliberate infliction of still-greater insecurity in a time already heavily freighted with it, we will find that there’s nobody coming to help us—no system and no structure beyond those we are able to articulate for ourselves. If I express a belief that we’ll surely rise to the challenge together, it’s another way of saying that this will be because we won’t have any other choice. —ADAM GREENFIELD, WRITER AND URBANIST