Metaphors abound in Tim Altenhof’s wholly original Breathing Space (Zone Books, 2026). The Victorian-era eggheads to whom the book introduces us—the German scientist Max von Pettenkofer and the American ventilation expert Lewis W. Leeds, to name but two examples—readily equate walls with porous skin and rooms with mechanical lungs. There is, for Altenhof, a through line from these earlier obscure figures to the obsessive attempts by architects like Erich Mendelsohn and Le Corbusier to measure, control, and facilitate air circulation. This project of “disciplining” breathing has a sinister ring; indeed, it was at this time that airborne poisons were deployed at an unprecedented scale, making respiration more lethal than ever before. But for the most part, the mephitic trenches of World War I are sidestepped in Breathing Space in favor of appreciations of inventive buildings like Mendelsohn’s Luckenwalde Hat Factory (1923), “whose soaring form evinced the upflow of hostile steam inside.”
Altenhof, an architect and historian who teaches at the University of Innsbruck,…