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, writes with a studied nonchalance, expertly holding the reader’s attention in a manner reminiscent of his mentors, the historians Kurt Forster and Anthony Vidler. The book leaps from Thomas Mann to industrial pollution to modern dance techniques, then back to antiquity and the Renaissance, without coming across as labored. Yet this affect has limitations. Breathing Space has little to say about happenings outside of Europe and the United States—which one suspects would point toward a more complex understanding of the production and control of different breathing subjects at the height of Western colonization. And though Altenhof’s concept of “respiratory modernism” is illustrated in lofty prose, it lacks historical definition. One is left wondering what precisely constitutes this vaporous movement, why it arose, and what distinguishes it from earlier and later instances of breathing-conscious architecture. Answering these questions would, I suspect, mean grappling with respiratory modernism’s implication in eugenics, colonial violence, and the broader emergence of biopolitics.
It’s not until the coda that Altenhof gets around to addressing the double meaning of its title. There is space in which to breathe, with the implication of rest and recovery, and space that itself breathes. Altenhof positively contrasts “permeable architecture” with the later paradigm of the sealed interior—represented, trollishly, not by office parks or junkspace malls but by the mania for inflatables in the work of Archigram and other pop-inflected design groups. I take Altenhof’s point that we can’t hide out from ecological wreckage in our air-conditioned bubbles (despite claims to the contrary), but the relationship between the two paradigms deserves closer scrutiny. The atmospheric disciplining of a century ago looks, at least to me, less like an alternative to the climate control of the present than its progenitor.