CITY.F26

This course will explore architectural history research methods, focusing on spatial histories of healthcare, accessibility, and radical health activism. Over the course of the semester, students will develop methods of interpretation for exploring the agency of individuals and groups who have shaped spaces of health and care—including hospitals, clinics, homes, community centers, landscapes, and activist spaces—as well as the lives shaped by these buildings and by the notions of “health” they produce. The aim of the course is twofold. First, to cultivate feminist, disability studies, and critical race studies perspectives on the history of the built environment through the interpretation of sites of medical authority, discipline, and care. Second, to build confidence in reading urban and architectural documents—floor plans, perspective drawings, photographs, three-dimensional objects, design periodicals and product advertising, post-occupancy surveys, etc.—by connecting them with these broader historical themes. To this end, the course will be structured as a hybrid lecture and methodology workshop, with each week including interactive activities ranging from collective architectural drawing interpretation and annotation to site visits that illuminate how spatial histories of health are curated in the present.

Following two introductory weeks of reading discussion illuminating how notions of the “healthy” or “normal” body have been historically constructed in ableist, gendered, and racialized terms, this course will be organized around three modules: Designing Health, Environmentalizing Health, Reclaiming Health. Each module has its own set of questions animating historical conceptions of embodiment and well-being through the lens of architectural history and landscape studies:

PART I. DESIGNING HEALTH
How have hospitals, clinics, maternity wards, rehabilitation centers, and other spaces of care been shaped by changing ideas about health, illness, and bodily difference? How have these spaces, in turn, sorted, disciplined, segregated, or cared for bodies differently, producing racialized, gendered, and class-based hierarchies of care and shaping definitions of disability and mental illness?

PART II. ENVIRONMENTALIZING HEALTH
What if the very spaces designed to shelter and make us healthy can also make us sick? How have the materials and infrastructures of the built environment—from lead and toxic adhesives to petroleum-derived plastics and polluted landscapes—exposed different bodies and communities to different forms and degrees of risk? Who gets to decide which risks are acceptable, and whose bodies are considered expendable?

PART III. RECLAIMING HEALTH
What would health look like if communities, rather than hierarchical institutions, were given the power to define and produce it? How have Black and Latine activists, disabled and neurodivergent people, LGBTQ+ communities, women, and other marginalized communities challenged institutional models of care and created alternative spaces rooted in autonomy, mutual aid, and collective power?

Over the course of the semester, we will explore these questions by placing our own, embodied experiences of the built environment in conversation with scholarly texts historicizing the transformation of health spaces and infrastructures. We will also center our own embodied experiences, needs, and constraints as we visit key sites, including the Pennsylvania Hospital Museum in Philadelphia.