“SkinlessArchitecture” Beatriz Colomina

it was the widespread use of the X-ray that made anew way of thinking about architecture possible. Ifarchitectural discourse has from its beginning asso-ciated building and body, the body that it des-cribes is the medical body, reconstructed by eachnew theory of health.

Modern architecture, for example, is unthink-able outside tb. The principles of modern architec-ture seem to have been taken straight out of amedical text on the disease which in the late 19thcentury gave as causes of tb “unfavorable climate,sedentary indoor life, defective ventilation anddeficiency of light.“ In response, modern architectsoffered sun, light, ventilation, exercise, roof ter-races, hygiene, and whiteness as means to pre-vent, if not cure, tuberculosis.

In his book The Radiant City of 1935, Le Cor-busier dismissed the “natural ground” as a “dis-penser of rheumatism and tuberculosis” and de-clared it to be “the enemy of man.” He advocatedpilotis to detach buildings from the “wet, humidground where disease breeds,” and roof gardensfor sunbathing and exercise. He utilized medicalpictures of the lungs and their inner workings asarchitectural illustrations, and developed a con-cept of “exact respiration” whereby the indoor airwas continually circulated and cleaned, made“dust free, disinfected, … and ready to be con-sumed by the lung.” One by one, all the character-istic features of modern architecture (pilotis, roofgarden, glass walls, and clean air) turn out to bemedical devices.

Modern buildings even started to look likemedical images. Mies van der Rohe described hisGlass Skyscraper of 1922 as skin-and-bones archi-tecture, and rendered it as if seen through an X-ray machine. Mies was not alone. Our slide libra-ries are filled with images of translucent glass skinsthat reveal inner bones and organs. Take for exam-ple, Le Corbusier’s Glass Skyscraper (1925), WalterGropius’s Bauhaus (1926), Brinkman and Van derVlugt’s Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam (1925–27),George Keck’s Crystal House in the 1933–34World’s Fair in Chicago, and Paul Nelson’s Sus-pended House (1935). This is more than a domi-nant aesthetic. It is a symptom of the deep influ-ence of medical discourse on architecture.

X-ray technology and modern architecturewere born around the same time and evolved inparallel. By midcentury the see-through house hadbecome a mass phenomenon, just as the mobiliza-tion against tb launched programs for the mass X-raying of entire populations. While the X rayexposed the inside of the body to the public eye,the modern building unveiled its interior, subject-ing what was previously private to public scrutiny.In an interview published in House Beautiful, EdithFarnsworth, a successful Chicago doctor, compar-ed her famous weekend house, designed by Mies

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Five points as way of an introduction 1. In a way my work has always been on the virtu-al. I have concentrated on the construction ofarchitecture in the media, the virtual architectureof photographs, films, exhibitions, publications,etc. My main point has been that buildings areconceived and transformed through media ratherthan simply represented in the media.Furthermore, architecture is itself from the begin-ning a form of media.

2. These virtual systems are not simply opposed tothe material reality of architectural objects. Theobjects themselves take on the characteristics ofthe media in which they are represented.

3. These media are not just the obvious publica-tion systems of the mass media to which I havedevoted a lot of attention in the past. There areother ways of making things public, other ways ofseeing the world, experimental ways of seeingobjects, including ourselves, our own bodies.

4. In fact, the techniques of representation inarchitecture are specifically related to techniquesfor representing the body. The relationship bet-ween architecture and medical science is muchmore intimate than we think.

5. So to ask ourselves about virtual architecturehere in a conference about architecture and themedia, I think we have to look at the media ofmedical science.

Skinless ArchitectureThe line between public and private no longercoincides with the outer limit of a building. Wemight even argue that the envelope is no longer tobe found on the outside. It has coiled itself upwithin an imaginary body.

Architectural envelopes respond to our imageof the human body rather than to functional pro-grams. This is an old story. Architecture has alwaysfollowed medicine. During the Renaissance, forexample, when doctors investigated the myster-ious interior of the body by cutting into and dis-secting it, architects tried to understand the interi-or of the building by slicing section cuts through it.In the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci, cutawayviews of architectural interiors appeared besideanatomical drawings. He understood the interiorsof the brain and womb in architectural terms, asenclosures that must be cut through to reveal theirsecrets. The central reference for architecture wasno longer a whole body, but a dissected, frag-mented, analyzed body.

As medical representations changed so didarchitectural representations. In the 20th century,

van der Rohe in 1949, to an X ray, and cited a lo-cal rumor that the house was a tuberculosis sana-torium. The X-ray aesthetic was inseparable fromthe discourse about the disease.

The X ray is not simply an image of the body,however. More crucially, it is an image of the bodybeing imaged. The X ray is not just about showingan inside. The exterior envelope remains as a kindof shadow or blur. To look at an X ray is to feelone’s eye penetrating the surface of the body andmoving through space. The very act of looking isexposed. It is inevitably voyeuristic. Perhaps thatwas what attracted architects to X rays from thebeginning. With Mies, the glass is never complete-ly transparent. Even at night one senses the outerlimit of the building and one’s eye passing throughthat limit. Modern architecture exposed itself, butnot by revealing everything. Rather, it staged theact of exposure, calling the eye in.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the cat

scan (Computerized Axial Tomography) may be forus what the basic X ray was for architects early inthe twentieth century. In fact, the cat scan is sim-ply many X-ray images compiled by a computer togenerate cross-sectional views and three-dimen-sional images of the body’s internal organs. A typi-cal medical brochure describes it thus: “Imaginethe body as a loaf of bread and you are looking atone end of the loaf. As you remove each slice ofbread, you can see the entire surface of that slicefrom the crust to the center.” The crust, skin, orenvelope becomes an almost invisible line. Whatmatters is the dense interior, which is renderedlike a new, more complex kind of facade.

As with the X ray, architects have been quickto respond to the new technology. If architecturalpublications at the beginning and middle of thecentury were full of X rays, contemporary architec-tural publications are full of cat scan images. Forexample, on the cover of a 1992 catalogue of anexhibition of his work, Jose Luis Mateo shows acat scan of a brain and insists within that “thearchitect has to act with the callousness of themedic: he cuts, analyses, researches. But he mustnever mummify an organism that lived once.”Likewise, un Studio shows cat scans of the brainalongside their projects in their 1999 book Move.The Renaissance obsession with the brain contin-ues into the twenty-first century, as does interestin the fetus – as evidenced by the “embryological”work being done by digital architects.

The influence of the cat scan is reflected inrecent architectural envelopes. In the Office forMetropolitan Architecture’s Bibliothèque Natio-nale competition entry, the exposure of a skeletonbehind a glass skin gives way to translucent bodiesrevealing organs. And Foreign Office Architects’Yokohoma Port Terminal also seems to follow thelogic of the cat scan: an endless series of section

cuts is used to assemble a three-dimensional body.At Yokohama, there is no simple opposition bet-ween the outside and the inside. The buildingaspires to be a continuously folded surface wherestructure and skin are one, and there are no bonesor discrete organs.

Today, there are new instruments of medicaldiagnosis, new systems of representation. So if wewant to talk about the state of the art in buildingenvelopes, we should look to the very latest tech-niques of imaging the body and ask ourselves whateffects they may have on the way we conceivebuildings.

The latest techniques represent yet anotherradical transformation of our thinking regardingthe relationship between inside and outside. Forexample, the M2A camera that was approved bythe fda in 2001 is a one-inch-long disposablecamera that is swallowed as a pill. M2A is short for“mouth to anus. It snaps two color pictures aminute for eight hours as it passes through the 22-foot-long digestive tract. A recorder the size of awalkman collects 57,000 color images while a per-son goes about normal business. The images arethen downloaded on a computer to produce avideo of the camera’s journey.“

Like the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage, inwhich a team of scientists is shrunk and injectedinto the body to repair a brain injury, the M2Atransforms the body into an occupiable interior.The body is turned inside out, making the skinirrelevant. All that remains is an endless interior,bathed in the light from the capsule video camera.The capsule itself looks like a hybrid of the build-ings inspired by X rays and cat scans. A translu-cent envelope exposes the outlines of the innermechanisms while a transparent head serves as theviewing apparatus. This hybrid displaces both thetransparent and translucent systems in favor of askinless body, one no longer even experienced as abody. The architectural analog would be the skin-less building, the building turned inside out tosuch an extent that it may not be clear it is abuilding.

What this complete loss of the envelope exact-ly means for architecture is unclear, but in an agein which the public/private distinction is so radi-cally dissolved, an architecture without envelopesmay well be upon us.

Author:Beatriz ColominaPrinceton University

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