‘Hans Castorp peered through the lighted window, peered into Joachim Ziemssen’s empty skeleton.’ In the sanatorium of Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, the protagonist gazes at his cousin’s bones through a screen; the column of his spine, the soft envelope of his flesh, the dark spots of his tuberculosis. Nothing will be the same for Castorp after this moment, when the lines between interior and exterior become blurred by the X-ray. 

The Magic Mountain is quoted several times throughout X-Ray Architecture (2019), a fascinating new book by the theorist Beatriz Colomina, issued by Lars Müller Publishers. It crops up with good reason. The bones of Colomina’s persuasive and wide-ranging argument are that modern architecture was shaped by the 20th century’s medical obsession with tuberculosis as well as with the tool for its diagnosis: the X-ray. Together, these clinical and technological paradigms brought about a new way of thinking about bodies and spaces, insides and outsides, health and architecture. 

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The book argues that these nascent experiments in glazed buildings were more than a novel aesthetic; rather, they were ‘a symptom of a deep-seated philosophy of design deriving from medical discourse’. By the 1930s, the idea of the glass house had become a symbol for a new form of health, as well as surveillance: the inhabitant a patient under observation from the outside world. But, like the overlapping bones and diaphanous tissue of an X-ray image, what is seen through the glass screen is not necessarily crystal-clear. When writing about the Eames House (1949), Colomina makes the point that the intention was not, in fact, transparency but a kind of blurring, with borders between interior and exterior confused.

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