The Archaeology of Infection

Lydia Kallipoliti, principal of ANAcycle, spoke at RICE about the history and resurgence of a bubble-minded architectural sensibility that stems from issues of cleanliness, infection, and environment. The acute relevance of the topic to the pandemic was not lost on Kallipoliti; as she put it bluntly, “We’ve never been more aware of our bodies in space.” Her careful reexamination of historical approaches to hygiene and microenvironments—whether in the form of design projects or theoretical critiques—took on a new light when brought to the contemporary forefront. Reyner Banham’s iconic Environment-Bubble and Erik Nitsche’s lithographs of weather control were shown adjacent to drawings of contemporary domestic spaces, as well as projections of future dwellings, tacitly showing their predictions to have come true.

Kallipoliti did not sugarcoat the present situation; she argued that past imaginaries of a clean, isolated lifestyle have taken the form of alluring spaces of confinement, where the barrier between life and work is broken. She warned that this is not merely a reaction to the current coronavirus crisis. As we begin our steps towards a new post-pandemic world, we must resist trends of detachment and embrace the “dirtier, fuzzier reality” of unregulated environments. What this would look like remains to be seen, but the underlying call is clear: “In this new world, we are in dire need of a new form of criticism.”