Desire by Design

In this episode, Lyssia sits down with Professor Beatriz Colomina, architectural historian, theorist, author, and professor at Princeton University, to explore the hidden forces shaping the spaces we live in and what those spaces reveal about us. Known for her groundbreaking work connecting architecture with media, medicine, sexuality, technology, and modern life, Beatriz has spent her career challenging the idea that architecture is simply about buildings. Instead, she argues that our spaces are psychological, cultural, biological, and constantly changing alongside the way we live.

The conversation breaks down why the idea of “home” has always been psychological. Beatriz explains why feeling at home has less to do with being inside a particular house and more to do with feeling comfortable, protected, and connected to the world around us. They explore how architecture functions as a form of media, how everything from cinema and television to smartphones has changed the way buildings frame our view of the world, and why the spaces around us are communicating far more than we may realize.

Beatriz also shares one of the most surprising ways architecture may be affecting our health: through microbes. Drawing from her research into the relationship between buildings and bacteria, she explains how increasingly sealed, sterilized environments may be separating us from the microbial diversity humans depend on. They discuss why spending time outside matters, how access to nature can influence recovery and well-being, and why the architecture of the future may need to become more porous, open, and connected to other forms of life.

The conversation also gets into a side of architecture rarely discussed: desire. Beatriz explains why sexuality and intimacy have always been architectural questions, and how Playboy became an unexpected force in popularizing modern design. From bachelor pads and round beds to Frank Gehry chairs and cutting-edge mid-century furniture, they explore how Playboy used architecture as part of a larger fantasy of seduction, and why our homes still operate as a form of identity and attraction today.

They also unpack how moments of crisis reshape the way we live. Beatriz traces how epidemics helped create modern sewer systems, clean water infrastructure, parks, terraces, large windows, and ideas about ventilation, while wars accelerated technologies like radio and the telephone. They discuss how COVID normalized working, teaching, and socializing from home almost overnight, blurring the line between public and private life in ways that would have seemed unimaginable only a few years earlier.

Beatriz also reflects on what happens when our homes become stages for our lives. From Zoom calls that suddenly revealed our bedrooms to TikTok videos carefully framed against architectural backdrops, we now show parts of our private spaces that previous generations worked hard to conceal. At the same time, she points to another defining architectural challenge of our era: loneliness. As more people live alone and more of our relationships move through screens, she asks whether architecture can create new ways for us to have solitude without losing connection.

By the end of this episode, you may realize that architecture is shaping far more than where you live. It is influencing how you feel, how healthy you are, what you desire, what you reveal, how you connect with other people, and even what you consider private in the first place.

More Room to Think:

Professor Beatriz Colomina
Princeton University: https://arc-hum.princeton.edu/people/beatriz-colomina
We the Bacteria: https://triennale.org/en/events/we-the-bacteria-notes-toward-biotic-architecture
Privacy and Publicity: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262032148/privacy-and-publicity/

Room to Think
https://roomtothinkpodcast.com/

Subscribe to Room to Think

If you enjoyed this episode, leave a review and share it with someone who would appreciate a more thoughtful approach to their space. New episodes every week. Build a better life by design.

Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Instagram

Transcript

Why Rooms Change How We Feel

Professor Beatriz Colomina 0:00

The whole category of home is always psychological. Home seek, feeling at home. Those are psychological things.

Lyssia Katan 0:06

When did you first realize that architecture could reveal so much about human behavior?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 0:11

It's always psychological. One of the things that people don't understand is that the spaces are microbial, they are microbial systems, and that we and our buildings are made of microbes. The human is just a part of bacteria. Buildings operate as a kind of media, and media is a form of space that we occupy, so it's a kind of architecture.

Lyssia Katan 0:32

Why do you think intimacy, desire, and identity are so deeply tied to architecture?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 0:39

They are repressing architectural displays. They are kind of taboo. Nobody wants to talk about it, but I want to talk about it. Nobody seemed to have realized how much architecture was in Playboy. Playboy told me to.

Lyssia Katan 0:53

What if the sexiest thing in a room isn't a person in it, but the room itself? Welcome to Room to Think. Today I'm sitting down with Professor Beatrice Colomina, architectural historian, theorist, and professor at Princeton University, whose work challenges everything we think we know about space. Her work reveals how architecture has always been tied to media, culture, desire, and the way we present ourselves to the world. In this episode, Professor Colomina breaks down why architecture isn't just about buildings, but about the system shaping how we live, connect, and even seduce. We talk about how something like Playboy helped define modern design culture, why your home is more psychological than you think, and how architecture has always been influenced by everything from illness to technology to human behavior. Professor Calomina also shares how spaces act as a stage for our lives and why the environments we create might be revealing more about us than we can even imagine. By the end of this episode, you might start to realize that the spaces around you aren't just designed, they're performing. Let's get into it. Professor

Meet Beatriz Colomina And Her Work

Lyssia Katan 2:02

Beatrice Calomina, what an absolute honor having you on the show. Professor Calomina is an architectural historian, theorist, and professor at Princeton University, whose work explores the relationship between architecture, media, technology, sexuality, and modern life. She's the author of influential books, including Privacy and Publicity, Domesticity at War, and X-ray Architecture, and she has reshaped how we understand the relationship between space, the body, and modern life. Professor Colomina, welcome to Rumethink. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. I'm so honored to get to speak to you. So, really starting from the beginning, what do you do and why do you do it?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 2:45

Okay, so um very simply, I write, I teach, and I create uh exhibitions, basically. This is what I do. I write books, as you mentioned, and I teach at Princeton, I'm a professor there, and I do exhibitions all over the world about architecture and other things. Yes.

Lyssia Katan 3:03

What got you started in this?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 3:04

Oh, I study architecture. I studied architecture in Barcelona, and um I became very interested in ideas very soon, and uh when I finished, there was a position to teaching uh in history of architecture, and I took this uh uh this position and uh somehow this is how I started teaching. Soon after I finished to um to study architecture, I got my degree, I could have practiced architecture, but I went into writing and history theory, and then I got a fellowship to come to New York to start work towards my dissertation. And well, as so many people that come to New York and they never leave. So that's what happened to me. Yeah, and that was it. I was supposed to go back to my job in Barcelona and I never returned. Well, we're lucky to have you.

Lyssia Katan 3:55

Thank you. Before really getting into writing and even getting into architecture, was you you come from Barcelona, beautiful architecture there in the city and and really in all of Spain. Was there a space that changed you and made you think about spaces and buildings differently?

New York And Seeing Architecture As Culture

Professor Beatriz Colomina 4:12

You know, if anything changed me uh so much, was New York. New York, the city of New York changed me radically. That's why I couldn't go back, because I thought, oh myself, I'm a different person all of a sudden. And uh it was so incredible and so stimulating. I ended up um as a visiting scholar in a place called the New York Institute for the Humanities that was then run by Richard Sennet, and it was uh full with all these extraordinary people, people like Susan Sontak, who were who was writing this book of uh illness as a metaphor. And I became fascinated by this question of how architecture is always part of culture. So there were people from literature, from uh other fields, and uh, this is where um my whole world uh changed. You know, uh I came from a school of architecture in many ways more technical and history more uh kind of limited to architecture, and all of a sudden, all these ways in which you can see architecture in literature, in music, in opera, in all these things, it changed entirely my view of things. And so I owe an enormous debt to this place, um, but also to New York, because New York has this incredible stimulating energy, this nervousness that uh is very, very it goes very well with me, you know. So in many ways I write better here than in any other place in the world.

Lyssia Katan 5:42

Yeah. And you said often in your work that architecture doesn't exist separately from media and culture.

Buildings As Media In A Screen World

Lyssia Katan 5:50

Yeah. Do you think people today experience spaces more through screens rather than physical reality as opposed to the past?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 6:00

Yeah, both. I mean, we both experience uh uh we live in a kind of hybrid uh space between physical and mediatic. This is a very good example. We are both in our spaces, but we are also communicated with somebody uh through media. But it's also important to recognize that screens are physical and that buildings also are kind of a form of media, as I argue, in privacy and publicity. So basically, buildings are a form of communication, they have always been a form of communication from the cathedrals, for example. They convey ideas about the culture of the world and society in the same way that and we accept that that art and literature uh uh do. But we have more difficulty understanding than that's what architecture does as well. So buildings operate as as a kind of media, and media has a kind of uh it's a form of space that we occupy, so it's a kind of architecture. So right? I mean it was very, very interesting in the beginning of the internet when there was even this dot dot ob and remember AOL and the So it's always with these metaphors of uh of a space because it's actually a space that we enter, that we occupy. So this is what my first book argued that that media in many ways modernizes um architecture, right? Uh rather than let's say the typical things that we normally talk about, the steel, the glass, all these new materials, concrete, etc. Uh it's very clear in cases like Le Corbusier, for example, who was very, very, very affected by media, by modern advertising, by photography, right? And and it changed entirely his architecture, right? He also the way in which he promoted his architecture was changed.

How Cinema Changed The Window

Lyssia Katan 7:57

Do you have any examples of like a very clear space, architectural space that is directly related to what was going on at that time or a moment in time?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 8:07

Yes, I think, for example, if we stay with Le Corbussier, the whole idea of the horizontal window, which was very, very controversial at that time, but he's arguing for this horizontal view of uh which goes completely against the French uh uh what they call the porfenêtre, which is the the door window. So this idea that you open uh a door that opens to the outside and you have this perspectival view of the world. He uh I thought that this was uh from the past and that now we needed this kind of uh horizontal view. But this horizontal view is completely unthinkable without uh cinema, which brought us this uh this frame, right? I mean, cinema could have been different, but it was this way. And it's totally affected by this. And he imagines uh when he does this house for his mother on the lake of um Lake Geneva in Switzerland, this little house, and he imagines this boat going down the lake. So from the house you can see this boat moving. So basically, you are seeing from the house, as if the house was afraid to see you to see the wall, you see this film of this boat that moves uh along the lake. So this is the this is a very clear example and very, very controversial at that time, with many architects arguing that this was kind of uh, you know, not architecture at all, this kind of window.

Lyssia Katan 9:35

Do you think it's gonna change again as we switch to using our phones and we're looking at it then vertically?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 9:40

Yes, I mean it may have changed already. I mean, from the vertical window, we went to the kind of picture window of uh mid-century uh America, in many ways inseparable from television. So with each new uh technologies of view or views of architecture, and in particular, particularly our views or the way in which architecture frames the outside change, because the dominant uh uh theme is the media, actually.

Lyssia Katan 10:09

Your

Home As A Psychological State

Lyssia Katan 10:10

work often looks at the home as a psychological and political space, not just a functional. When did you first realize that architecture could reveal so much about human behavior?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 10:22

Well, the whole the whole category of home is always psychological. Think about the kinds of things that we say. I'm homesick, right? Or uh we talk about feeling at home, for example. Those are psychological feelings. What does it mean? You can also be feeling at home in the mountains or feeling at home, you know, somewhere else, and not feel at home in your own home. So it's always psychological, and this is a very, very important part of uh of architecture, that it's inseparable from all these psychological uh estates.

Lyssia Katan 10:56

It's interesting. We don't think about it. We'll say a person feels like home or this space feels like home, but what is that even referring to?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 11:03

It refers to a psychological uh state, to feeling comfortable, to feeling protected, to feeling uh to feeling somehow, yeah, that we are at home, right? At home in the world is also a very good expression in English, feeling at home. Uh it's not necessarily inside a house, so it's always psychological. That's that's I suppose very important. And and the part of psychology, Freud, the verse of psychoanalysis is totally inseparable from the home and the whole domestic drama, and uh so it is those things are very, very connected.

Lyssia Katan 11:41

A lot of people think architecture is about buildings, but your work specifically suggests it's really about systems of living. What do most people misunderstand about the spaces they're inhabiting every single day?

The Microbiome Inside Every Building

Professor Beatriz Colomina 11:55

Yeah, well, exactly. One of the things that uh that people don't understand, and I'm just going to um uh talk a little bit about the latest book that I have written, actually with Mark Wigley, which is this either book called With the Bacteria, not towards biotic architecture, which was a huge exhibition in uh in the Triale de Milano, in Milan in the Triale building last year, about the 10,000-year-old relationship between architecture and microbes, right? And it's very, very important because um one of the things the things that people don't understand is that the spaces are microbial, right? Microbial systems, and that we and our buildings are made of microbes. The human is just a pack of bacteria, right? And even our thoughts or our emotions are totally microbial. So this um uh, you know, saying this common expression in English, I hope I have a gut feeling, well, it's correct. There's a clear connection between the gut and the brain, and this connection is completely um organized by the bacterial diversity in your gut, which is responsible for all the health problems of our time. You know that I have always been interested in health and architecture, but what we understand as health is constantly evolving, and now we are in um so-called the so-called microbiome paradigm, and everybody understands that now at a normal level, like uh you have to be careful about what you put in your mouth, and everybody is taking, I don't know, probiotics and eating kefir or kombucha or I don't know what. But what people don't understand is how much architecture is implicated also in this uh reduction of the diversity of bacteria in our guts that is responsible basically for all the health problems of our time, all these new forms of uh allergies, all these autoimmune disorders, many forms of cancer, even autism, Alzheimer's, even mental uh uh the current epidemic of um depression and uh and even suicide in young people is attributed to the fact that we have lost half of the um diversity of bacteria in our guts, right? Half is a lot. And and uh and there is a lot of research in the science, and we are doing a lot of research in architecture to um to talk about the fact that this uh kind of isolation of the building from the environment, from the uh soil, from the ground, has created also a huge health issue. So, this is one of the things that I'm fascinated at the time, uh, in terms of buildings and and health and well-being, right? And the need in a way to have more porous uh buildings in which the outside uh comes in and and we uh kind of enrich our lives because the majority of the bacteria is in the soil. So this is uh this is something that people don't don't the the the thing that I will say that is more um important right now, and some scientists think it's more important that climate, more urgent that climate than climate uh uh change. And it's not just architecture, of course, it's the diet and the overuse of antibiotics and these things, but what people don't understand is how much architecture is also implicated in this reduction of uh of bacteria.

Lyssia Katan 15:32

Was there a time that more bacteria or more in nature was incorporated in our architecture that we had more in our bodies?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 15:43

Yes, yes, of course, but it it is that's why we say the 10,000 uh years old, because the moment that we went indoors uh in the Neolithic, the moment that we built the kind of uh structures that steal us from the uh from the environment, it is very interesting because we became shorter and died earlier. So we have diseases that never had been a problem before. So tuberculosis, for example, became endemic. You know, all these epidemics uh started precisely at the moment, so there's no architecture without epidemics without disease. And that's fascinating because the architect is always presenting umself or herself as producing health, and it's one of the important things that Vitruvius already says that the architect is supposed to produce health for the inhabitants, but it's a paradox because architecture itself reduces uh the diversity. There was a very, very interesting uh study in um in uh in Finland in Kerela. Kyerilla is an area that used to be part of Russia, and after after the war was divided, and half of it ended up in um in uh in Russia and the other uh the Soviet Union at the time and the other part in Finland. The part of Finland is much uh it became much richer, industrialized, people live in high rises, they have better better health care, etc. And the people in the Russian uh side they continue to be agriculture and poor, etc. Well, these people have the same genetic makeup, so it was very interesting that they did a very uh thorough study of the children on both sides. And then it turned out that the people on the Russian side, the people that now are in the Russian side that are still agriculture, that are still in conser in contact with the soil, etc., didn't have any of the problems of the Western world, like allergies, I mean autoimmune disorders, nothing of that. They have the regular problems of um of childhood and also problems related to the lack of antibiotics or the lack of healthcare. But the people on the the kids on the on the Finnish side, they have all the same problems we have uh here: obesity, diabetes, um all forms of uh of uh um autoimmune disorders, allergies, everything. Uh early forms of cancer, you know, that they don't have on the other side. So, how is that um connected? It's connected precisely because of the diminishing diversity of bacteria in the industrialized part of this area, right? So it's a very clear example in which you can demonstrate that this is um happening.

Porous Buildings And Rethinking Cleanliness

Lyssia Katan 18:35

That is fascinating. And how do you suggest that we bring it back into our lives? Is it uh it's probably not as simple as playing in the soil or gardening or spending time outside, is it?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 18:45

Yes, it is. Part of it is this. We need to spend more time outside, we need buildings that are more porous, that are more open to the to the outside. The worst is these uh uh totally enclosed buildings that where people spend a lot of their uh uh time in uh office buildings that became more and more ermatic. Uh unfortunately, with uh um the uh energy crisis, they became more ergmentic to save energy, but they created a lot of problems for these people. And the most dangerous places of all are hospitals, of course. I mean, you now you know go to a hospital and have um enormous chances of getting one of these um uh infections that are resistant to antibiotics, right? And this is a major problem. This is in 2027 will be the biggest cause of uh death in the world. I mean, so this is massive, uh, according to the World Health Organization. So it's very, very serious. Um and in the during COVID, now we were in Italy for this exhibition, and we learned that during COVID in some hospitals in Milan, they did an experiment. You know, Milan was a horrible place to be during COVID. They sprayed the walls of the hospital with good bacteria rather than the stream cleaning methods that they usually uh deploy. They put good bacteria and the people that were in those hospitals they recovered earlier and left the hospital earlier, and there were less deaths and less complications and no um secondary infections, particularly no antibiotic resistant uh infections. So, this is a very good example that our system has to be in this uh kind of balance between good bacteria and bad bacteria that keeps the bad bacteria in check, the good bacteria keeps the bad bacteria. Inst instead of trying to eliminate all the bad bacteria with antibiotics or with modern architecture, which uh has the effect actually of producing this um this uh streamophile. Streamophiles is this bacteria that resist everything, you know. Bleeds, whatever you want. There um there's bacteria in nuclear plants, there's bacteria in the space station, they can resist anything. And those are the very dangerous ones, the ones in hospitals where where um uh they have survived all the cleaning methods, these are the most dangerous bacteria.

Lyssia Katan 21:19

That's fascinating. And I'm curious, like my generation is millennial, so if we didn't we didn't have so much of the internet until later on. So we did go outside and play on bikes and ride around the neighborhood and play in the in the backyard and outside. But kids today, they have this technology, they're staying in their houses, they're staying in their in their rooms. This is more Gen Z and Gen Alpha. How it I mean, I can only imagine how is that gonna impact their well being, all based off of architecture, really.

Professor Beatriz Colomina 21:51

Yeah, I mean, it's a terrible, it's a terrible situation, and I'm very encouraged by the fact that the younger generation is reacting against it. It must have They want to go more analog, they want to ditch their phones. I mean, good for them. I mean, yes, it's fantastic, right? Uh, because this is not good in so many ways and has led to so many uh problems, and uh among them loneliness and and um and depression and and even suicidal uh thoughts, etc. But in many ways they are also connected to this reduction of um of bacteria by spending too much time indoors and separated precisely uh from the from the outside.

Desire, Taboo, And Domestic Space

Lyssia Katan 22:35

So you've also written very extensively about two topics that I would never have put in the same category, but sexuality and space. Uh-huh. Why do you think, and this is like when I read this, I was like, whoa, this is very cool. Why do you think intimacy, desire, and identity are so deeply tied to architecture?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 22:58

Okay, architecture is always a way of sharing, a way of living together, right? So, of course, intimacy, desire, sexuality, all those things are impossible to think without architecture. They they exist in architecture. So there is this very complex uh uh things that are very much part of architecture, but they are repressing architectural discourse, and this is they are kind of taboos, right? And nobody wants to talk about it, but I want to talk about it. I try to work against all of these taboos and to think about how desire and sexuality are very much part of architecture and architectural history, right?

Lyssia Katan 23:38

Yeah, but how how did you even like what even inspired this connection that you were able to put together?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 23:44

The thing is that most of the things that I write about are obvious. For example, um X-ray architecture that talk about how uh tuberculosis is really uh, you know, impossible to think about modern architecture without thinking about tuberculosis because all the ideas of the modern architects come actually from manuals on um tuberculosis that advocated for uh terraces, for the sand and ventilation and big windows and white walls, et cetera elimination of the ornament. They are just following medical treatises. And then you also have to think about the fact that one in three people in big cities like Paris were dying of tuberculosis. So if we think that COVID was bad, that was nothing. One three, so it was a major uh uh trauma that was affecting all of them, their wives, their children, themselves, you know, so many architects like Richard Neutra spent a year in a sanatorium in Switzerland. Then he claimed that his architecture prevented tuberculosis. Yes, of course he did, right? I mean, so they worked precisely to counter all these traumas, all these problems of their time. Likewise with uh with sexuality, I mean, you mentioned before psychology, psychoanalysis. I mean, it's impossible to separate sexuality from the interior, from the domestic space. I mean, it's uh all in uh psychoanalytic theory, but it's also in architecture. One of the examples that was really amazing to me was Um Playboy. Playboy, you know, is a magazine that has been taken seriously in many fields, including literature. Umberto Echo wrote a book about uh Playboy and how literature was so important in Playboy. But you know, nobody seemed to have realized how much architecture was in Playboy and the importance of architecture for Playboy. In many ways, Hefner understood this question that you just asked me, that sexuality was an architectural question. Because if you look at the magazine from the very first issues, there are articles on uh Fran D'Royte and Miss Van der Roy is in Chicago, of course. So he starts with architects from the area, but then very soon he covers all the 20 the mid-century architects like Charles Andre Eames, all the designers, Aero Saarinen, uh Berthoya, you know, all of them, Nelson, and all of a sudden we are with John Laudner in California. He even at a certain point talks about Charles Moore, Frank Gehry, all of them, right? So as he goes through the decades, Playboy is basically presenting to the American public cutting-edge architecture, right? So in fact, you know, yes, it's a sex magazine, but in other ways you can argue that Playboy did more for modern architecture than the Museum of Modern Art or any other institution. Because you have to think about the fact that at the speak they were printing 7 million copies. Okay, 7 million copies. How many readers is that? 20 million, 30 million? I don't know. Many people read one Playboy, I'm sure. So in fact, it made it popular. It made it popular to um uh to understand uh and to love modern architecture and modern design. I give you an example. I gave when I was working on this topic by chance, I gave a lecture in Cornell about Playboy and architecture and all these designers and all the things that they publish and the things that they promote and so on. And at the end of the lecture, this middle-aged woman comes to me and she says, Now I understand why my father has this amazing collection of chairs of hunger, sarinen, uh, ink, etc. My father who never went to the university, never went to, never goes to a museum, he doesn't, he's not interested in art. So once he went and asked him, Why do you have all of these things? And he says, Playboy told me to buy them, right? No, the famous uh Frank Gary cardboard uh chair, which now is I don't know how many thousands of dollars, at that time was being sold at Blooming Death for $37. And I know that because Playboy says buy that chair in Blooming Des is $37, it's by this new young architect in California. And if you have followed the advice, you will have done very well. So they don't separate sexuality from design and from architecture. So I think it's a very good example of how uh, you know, uh sexuality is in many ways an architectural question. But you can see it everywhere.

Lyssia Katan 28:39

I mean, there's also something to be said about the the bachelor pad and Playboy creating this space that is you know so desirable, and women want to go to this space and they want to spend time in it. So it's inspiring all sorts of people to duplicate it.

Professor Beatriz Colomina 28:54

Right, right. Not only, but but they present it as a space of seduction, given actually the steps that you have to follow in order to seduce someone in the space. So it's very architectural in so many different levels. It's it's fascinating. So I enjoy very much doing that project.

Lyssia Katan 29:14

It's fascinating. Like I said, when I saw it, I was and I and I was reading like one of the issues was specifically about architecture, and it was like the most read issue of Playboy. Yes.

Professor Beatriz Colomina 29:26

Well, uh architecture is in every single issue. You know, when I did this seminar at Princeton with uh with the students, I asked the librarian to get all the issues of Playboy. She's gonna have a heart attack. But she did, and then we went page by page, and it was amazing from the very, very first issue, architecture is there, uh and very, very uh consistent until the end of the 70s, uh until postmodernism basically. Uh, architecture is very much uh at the center of uh of Playboy in all of the issues. And and yes, the the Playboy uh houses were very popular with the public, and you know, millions of people in America built that round bed, and there was a cottage in the sea of um bed seats for this uh round bed and all kinds of other uh devices to make it possible. Yeah, yeah.

Lyssia Katan 30:22

It's almost like these invisible factors that we don't realize are impacting us every single day. And and we're seeing like we look at influencers today on social media, on Instagram, on TikTok, and people want to dress like them, they want to look like them. It's kind of like Playboy was the influencers of back then.

Professor Beatriz Colomina 30:40

Yes, and in many ways is you're right, because in many ways is it's very important now in social media, and many uh um social media sites for uh uh you know, like Grinder or Tinder or whatever, they use uh architecture as the background, right? I mean it's by people, uh Andres Hake and others, how uh architecture is always presented as the desirable setting in which this encounter is going to happen. So a lot of people use architecture as a form of seduction still, and this could be said to be a legacy of the of the Playboy um uh ideas.

Lyssia Katan 31:20

So interesting. Really? Things that I would have, like I said, I would have never put together. Well, you've also

Playboy And The Bachelor Pad As Design Engine

Lyssia Katan 31:26

written about war and how um illness, anxiety, war in general, unrest shapes architecture. Why do moments like these impact or produce entirely new ways of space or of living?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 31:42

Because there are moments of crisis, you can say wars, uh, epidemics, there are moments of crisis that obviously that's exactly what a crisis is. It provokes a new a new kind of uh of thinking and of living. And this way of uh of living becomes eventually the norm, and then we forget exactly what it is that happened that led us to think this way. So we forget, for example, that it was the great epidemics of the 19th century that brought us everything that is normal in our cities now the clean water, urban parts, uh you know, all this infrastructure, the sewer system, all was put in place in in the face of the great epidemics of cholera, typhoid fever, etc. So many people go to London and think of the embankment of London as this great piece of uh great example of public architecture, but very few people very few people realize that this uh actually was a response to the epidemics of cholera and typhoid fever that were killing everybody in in London. Uh, because the um uh the environment contains the sewage uh system. Before that, the people were throwing all the waste was going into the tanks, and then people were drinking the water from the river, therefore, they were getting all kinds of epidemics. And the medical establishment didn't understand that this was the problem. I mean, it took a long, long time for um for uh doctors and scientists to demonstrate that it was the water that was the problem. So, likewise with modern architecture and tuberculosis. So at the moment the crisis passes, we kind of develop all collective amnesia and we try to not think about it. But but in fact, the history of architecture, the history of the city is the history of the sea, is the history of a series of pandemics that put in place a number of structures and infrastructures, for example, in the case of the of the big epidemics of the 19th century that define uh how we live today. So this is crucial, yeah.

Lyssia Katan 33:55

So

War, Epidemics, And Why Cities Modernize

Lyssia Katan 33:56

this is why the collective amnesia is so true and relatable because maybe six years ago we would not have been doing this virtually, we'd be in the same room chatting, but COVID, Zoom, all these virtual calls, suddenly every one of my meetings is virtual almost, and it's we can't even we we forgot what it was like to before this.

Professor Beatriz Colomina 34:21

Yeah, and before we wouldn't have accepted it by any means because we knew it existed already, and people say, Oh, we could have and no, nobody wanted to do it, and all of a sudden we were forced to do it, and it was an incredible lesson. Everybody had to learn very quickly. We kept teaching uh from one week to the next on Zoom, and all of a sudden you had to learn to do this, and I you know, we survived somehow, and then became the norm, right?

Lyssia Katan 34:45

Do you think we need these things to happen in our world for us to push us, give us that like little push to you know, improve or get better?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 34:55

I don't know. Uh it's not it's not that we need, but it seems like it is historically. I mean, if you think about radio, radio is unthinkable or the telephone without World War uh I. World War I is the first uh war that um that includes this media, that developed this media, and at the end of the war, what do we have? We have that the um radio is a little thing that is in the middle of your living room bringing news from the outside. That's shocking, you know, that all of a sudden whatever you had to go out of the house to learn about is speaking to you from your living room, and that uh somebody from another part of the country can be calling you on the phone. So all of a sudden, this completely changes the relationship between what is public, what is private, what is inside, what is outside. It has enormous consequences for architecture. Likewise, the space program brought us all this mini-tarization, the laptop, etc. So every war, every conflict has brought us a new form of um of communication.

Lyssia Katan 36:00

You also say in X-ray architecture, you you explore how medicine and modern architecture became intertwined. Do you think today our obsession with wellness has kind of become a new kind of architecture itself?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 36:15

Yes, absolutely. I mean, wellness is what defines us uh uh today. But the relationship between uh illness as an architecture or health and architecture, you can say is ancient. As I say, is from the very beginning uh that of architecture that Vitruvius already in the first century BC, Vitruvius is like the first theorist of architecture, argues that the most important goal of an architect is health. And he talks about the theory of the four humors, which was the dominant theory at the time, and the circulation of the of the winds, and and opening the windows, and the orientation, and all these things. And with each new um uh era, a new idea of health emerges, and and then a new form of architecture appears. So this has always been very, very interconnected. And you're right, you're now in this moment of wellness. Wellness is all that we care about right now, right?

Lyssia Katan 37:13

Like wellness studios or at-home wellness, at-home gyms or or or all kinds of wellness spaces out in the world. How is that like the the snapshot you think we're gonna be leaving to generations in the future?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 37:29

Yeah, sure. Because right now we are not in the middle of a of an epidemic. So we are more concerned with uh maintaining uh uh health. Uh so it's a question of maintenance, right? And longevity. Longevity is also a very important question uh right now, and billions of dollars are going into that uh industry and the obsession of people with um with living uh longer and and uh and more you know productive lives too. So this is also affecting us uh enormously, which doesn't mean that um that it will always be that way, you know, it's never a permanent change because this is constantly evolving. So along could come another epidemic or another war, I hope not, right? But uh you know, never can predict the future, that's the thing. And then something entirely different is uh important at that time.

Lyssia Katan 38:23

Right. In the moment, we think it's the the most unique thing that's ever happened, but really history repeats itself. Human beings, same things just come back around in different costumes, yeah, in different ways. You've spent so long studying how architecture shapes the body and the mind. Are there certain spaces that consistently make people feel calmer or more creative or more emotionally open, perhaps?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 38:53

Oh, that's very, very interesting. I think the relationship between inside and outside, in general, people feel calmer when they have views of the outside, particularly views of nature. In hospitals, they did this study uh a long time ago, or not so long time ago, a few decades, uh maybe a couple of decades ago, they studied the difference between people that have a window in their uh hospital room and people that didn't. And this is the amazing thing. People that uh had a window, even if the window was just looking at a tree, it was very cool. You know, they got better, they recovered earlier, etc. etc. So this is very, very important that it affects our mind and our health, uh, because these two things are very interconnected. So, of course, um uh gardens, more porous space, more openings to the outside are healthier, not just for the for the body, as we were talking before, but also for the mind. It makes us feel better.

Lyssia Katan 39:56

And your research often um does blur the line between architecture, philosophy, psychology, film, advertising, all of that. Why do you think architecture can't really be understood in isolation by itself?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 40:13

Right. I mean, in architecture has always been from the very beginning interdisciplinary. Again, going back to Vitruvius, Vitruvius says that the architect is somebody that knows a little bit about everything. I mean, we are a bit dilettant in architecture because we are super interested in everything else, right? In architecture, of course, but in film we have opinions about everything, about film, about literature, about media, about all kinds of things. So we can not separate architecture from the culture that produces it. And in the same way that you cannot separate art or literature from that culture, but in in architecture, it's very interesting because for a long time the histories of architecture didn't take into account that view, that it's actually part of culture, that you cannot separate it. And and I think that's what uh interests me, the way in which architecture, literature, art are part of this media, are part of the culture in which we live today, and you cannot separate these two things. But also has a lot to do with the first year that I spent in New York in the New York Institute for the Humanities, in which it was a very interdisciplinary place with many people from all um fields, and that affected very much the way in which I think about architecture in this in this way.

Lyssia Katan 41:31

Was

Literature, Atmosphere, And Spatial Memory

Lyssia Katan 41:32

there anything as you were learning this and once you arrived in New York, was there anything that genuinely surprised you about this connection?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 41:40

Everything surprised me. You know, the fact that somebody from literature was looking at the novels of Thomas Mann and looking at the sanatoria, and of course, being from architecture, I was again reading Thomas Mann and thinking to myself, but it's all about architecture. It's right. I mean, it's also it's not just about tuberculosis, it's also about modern architecture, how modern architecture plays a role in tuberculosis. So for me, it was completely an eye open opening experience because I have always been interested in literature, but I never used literature in my own um in my own work, and all of a sudden I was reading all these novels, uh Musil, Thomas Mann, all these people, in order to understand the architects that were living in that period, right? And the views they have of culture and of um so much architecture in literature, right?

Lyssia Katan 42:32

Yeah, it's interesting you say that because I'm thinking back to some of my favorite books growing up, and and the homes of the characters really feel like a home to me. I've never been there, but I I can tell you where everything is, I can tell you how it feels. And it's like I can I loved Harry Potter growing up. I can tell you what being at Hogwarts feels like because I've read about it, but I've never been.

Professor Beatriz Colomina 42:55

It doesn't even exist. Besides, because they create this atmosphere. So, how can we think that that doesn't have an effect on the architects that are reading this literature and vice versa? That people, the writers, are inspired by some of the buildings they uh visit, they experience during their lifetime. Of course they are. Thomas Mann is constantly writing about this new sanatoria uh in Davos, in Switzerland, where his um his wife uh uh was being treated for uh for tuberculosis, and she's he Thomas Mann is visiting uh Harra and spending so so much time there, and not only talking about the experience of all this community, all these great artists and and and creative people living there, but he pays a lot of attention to the architecture itself. So it's very, very interesting.

Lyssia Katan 43:47

I learned when I went to visit Porto that JK Rowling, she spent a lot of her time in in the city of Porto, and so many elements of uh of the book and of the characters and of the Everything were taken from the city itself, whether it's the the f fountain with griffins or the bookstore that had these this beautiful staircase that inspired the staircases of Hogwarts. So I mean I I can directly attest to that that I've I've seen it. It's it's fascinating how much and now that creates more inspiration for other people reading her book to maybe create something similar. So it's it's an ever-evolving thread of inspiration.

Professor Beatriz Colomina 44:26

Totally. Had you been in Porto? I have. I loved it. Amazing. It's an amazing city. I love it. I love it. It really is. And it's so uh unexpected. Yeah, you didn't know that you had to buy your car. No, I didn't know that. That's so interesting.

Lyssia Katan 44:41

Yeah, so I I mean, it's these little places. I really expected to love Lisbon more, and and Lisbon is beautiful, but Porto is just so many hidden gems, and the architecture just wow, it just blew me away. Beautiful

What New Architects Ask First

Lyssia Katan 44:56

place. Yeah. So you have you've taught generations of architects and theorists at Princeton University. Um, and and Princeton University's School of Architecture. What's something younger generations seem to understand about space that older generations have a harder time doing?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 45:14

So right. Well, that's a very, very interesting uh question because I think they see more dimensions. So, for example, the older generation may have been interested in materials and inform. And they are still interested in materials and inform, but they have questions that we didn't have before. Where is the material coming from? What kinds of forms of extraction? What carbon footprint has this material has? Where it is coming from, what kind of labor is uh is uh implied in this in using this material? Uh equity, all these questions of uh are are relevant and are new. I mean, the previous generation never thought about that. Where's that where does this Madagascar uh good come from in Miss Van der Royal buildings? Nobody asked that question. Right now, this is a major major problem, right? And so I love the new generation in that sense because they are asking new questions about about everything. And of course, they are very concerned with the with the environment, with the carbon footprint, etc. etc. So these are new questions.

Lyssia Katan 46:21

Yeah, no one asked if uh you know the materials used in Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings were were came to be because of like child labor or bad working conditions. We never thought about that. And now it's the first question.

Professor Beatriz Colomina 46:36

That's the first question, yeah. And this is very, very interesting and very new.

Lyssia Katan 46:39

Do

Privacy Collapse And The Staged Home

Lyssia Katan 46:40

you think that we reveal ourselves through our homes?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 46:44

Uh, some people reveal themselves through their home, other people use their home to hide, they are kind of recluse, and other people are live their lives on social media, they post what they are eating, and in the background is their living room, or they, you know, so there are different attitudes towards this, right? So people um are constantly on their phones and they are constantly kind of staging themselves in front of this. Is something new from this culture, nobody else did ever that before, right? So um uh through the telephone, through social media, we are constantly uh kind of uh staging our lives, right? And and many people you know craft this very carefully, and other people don't care, right? They're not on social media, they don't do any of this. On the contrary, they are kind of using the house of uh as a space to to hide from um public view.

Lyssia Katan 47:43

Yeah, you used to not know what your colleague's house looks like, but now it maybe you follow them on social media or you we used to not know what celebrities' houses look like unless they were on the cover of architectural digest or whatever magazine. But now we see every element. We see what couch they have, we see what what what you know measuring sets they're using when they're cooking. We we see everything.

Professor Beatriz Colomina 48:06

Everything, everything. And uh not just uh celebrities, but everybody is showing off everything, right? Everybody is uh using architecture as a as a stage, as a as a background to uh for this this performance that is their lives, right? Everybody is an actor now in their own kind of uh theater. What do you think it's doing to us, that theater? I don't know what it's doing. Uh I don't know what it's doing to to the truth. I don't do it myself, so I'm I'm not so sure. But I walk down the street uh here where I live in in Soho, and there are all these kids on TikTok, and architecture is important for them because they are not just anywhere. They place themselves in front of all these uh cast iron buildings, they love the architecture, the background, but it's not that they're making pictures of the architecture as we did when we came to New York and we were fascinated by these uh buildings. They are the focuses themselves, dancing or something and the background is the is the building, but the building is very important. They choose very carefully where they do their TikToks and their uh and their things. So, what is it doing to us? Who knows?

Lyssia Katan 49:20

Maybe they'll be studying this in another hundred years, I'm sure.

Professor Beatriz Colomina 49:24

Yes, I'm sure, because you know that's the thing. The things that are happening now will be understood a few years uh later, or a few decades at least uh later. I mean, at the beginning of photography and the uh illustrated uh uh magazine, uh celebrities precisely were very scandalized and and um and worried that their privacy was being exposed. They didn't like it at all. They were lost in France and they were all these paparazzi, they hated that, right? At the beginning of, and you know, obviously now is the it's the opposite. The same or the equivalent uh celebrities want to expose absolutely everything, right? Including the underwear, they um they buy whatever the spices they use in their kitchen, everything, right?

Lyssia Katan 50:13

I mean, I've seen that. I I work in tile, I grew up in the industry, and many years ago, people wouldn't want to share pictures of their bathrooms and their kitchens or how their tile looks and the combination. Today, everyone wants to show you what tile they installed and what brass hardware they put or what their drawer poles look like. And and they want to share it with the world. They want to say, look, this is my space. This is where I cook, this is where I connect with my family. And it's such a funny thing because years ago, nobody we would never let anyone take come in to take photos of how their space turned out.

Professor Beatriz Colomina 50:46

No, not at all, right? So our concept of what uh privacy is has been evolving very radically in in recent years. And this, of course, has implications for architecture because architecture is always about what is private and what is public, what is inside and what is outside. And now we're in a complete uh transformation of these uh uh categories, in which we are more in the private space, we are more in public than ever. You know, this became obvious also during COVID, when people were in their beds, all of a sudden you knew how the beds of your colleagues look like because they were on faculty meetings and they are sitting on their bed because maybe the kids are in the living room or whatever, and you know, and you don't have another space where you can close the doors. And everybody was all of a sudden sewing their beds. I mean, that's amazing, right? Everybody was working on their beds, and we still work on our beds. I mean, that's an incredible change.

What Comes Next: Bacteria And Loneliness

Lyssia Katan 51:43

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Looking ahead, what do you think will define the next era of architecture?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 51:52

Oh, well, that's so difficult to say. You know, so I'm not in the business of of predicting the future, of course. But uh, you know, some of the things well I can point out is all these uh trends that that we have been discussing uh here. What uh will remain or what will change? That's very difficult to predict. Um I I kind of resist them to to do this because at any one moment, any one of those things that we have mentioned changes everything. And it's very, very hard to predict.

Lyssia Katan 52:27

Is there anything that rather than predict, you would hope we do more of moving forward?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 52:33

Right. I mean, we have to to think a lot about a lot of things that are defining uh our era. And one of the things that I mentioned again is the question of health and the question of uh the bacterial uh life of you know, that is super, super important for our health and our well-being. And I'm hoping that uh that architecture will take this um uh seriously in the same way that many people are taking it seriously in their individual lives at the level of uh of what they eat, at the level of um of the uh restraining themselves from using too much antibiotics for uh for things that are not uh needed, etc. But also to think about this uh uh in terms of architecture, this uh producing buildings that are more um friendly to other species. Basically, we are not the only ones in this uh in this planet, and uh it's very, very important to think about uh kind of an interspecies uh architecture that includes these minute uh creatures that we depend on that they are part of our uh of our makeup. We are nothing without this micros, we're just this bug of uh of uh of bacteria. But we are like completely um determined to kill everything uh in our environments. I mean, if you look at the cleaning products in our houses, it's all antibacterial, kill this, kill that, kill the other thing. But the thing that we don't understand is that this killing is also killing us. So um uh this is one of the topics that I'm most uh passionate about. Uh the other one that I will mention, I think you mentioned it to the question of loneliness. Uh one of my last uh my last project, the one that I'm working with, the students right now, has to do with this, with uh uh the epidemic of loneliness and solitude, the trend towards living alone, which is uh is a global trend in in places like Northern Europe, in Estokolm, in Northern Europe, people 65% of people live alone. And indeed, this has even uh has grown a lot. In Japan, they get married and they continue to live in their separate environments. So it is very, very crazy. So as we were discussing before, the more we connect with more people, the more we want to live alone, and this is creating also another kind of um of problem, uh, which is all this uh epidemic of uh loneliness and and depression, etc., which is associated with our devices, but also uh with this um uh so there are many ways in which solitude can be very positive. I mean, there are thousands of examples in history, monasteries among them. Uh you can live alone together. And I'm very interested in how to think about this question of uh of uh of our times too. But as I say, both are questions. They are not like you know, they are not predictions or anything, just those are problems right now that I think architects could think about.

Lyssia Katan 55:44

Yeah, and and possibly maybe even solve, right? In a house instead of a Japanese couple living in two separate apartments, maybe a house that has different areas. So when people are feeling overwhelmed, they can retreat but then come together.

Professor Beatriz Colomina 55:58

Exactly, exactly. And and many, many other experiments in which people are living alone, but there are moments in which they come together to cook, to, to socialize, to you know, in in many ways to make physical what we do in social media, right? I think this could be good. More architecture. More architecture, yeah. More architecture. Instead of more social media, more architecture, more, more, more real spaces rather than only digital. Yeah.

Takeaways And Closing Thanks

Lyssia Katan 56:27

I agree. I agree. So we have listeners from all over the world. So this is not speaking to a specific place, but what do you hope someone listening to this episode takes away from it?

Professor Beatriz Colomina 56:38

Um I don't know. I hope that uh um they can maybe some of those uh things that we talk about make them think differently. That is always the goal to kind of change the ways in which we are uh kind of fixing our in our ideas, in our thinking. Something that makes you think is always wow, that's what I'm looking for whenever I go to a lecture or whenever I go to a new movie or a theater or whatever, right? I hope that it makes me see the world differently, right? And I think that this would be the main goal. Yeah, thank you.

Lyssia Katan 57:13

Professor Colomina, I'm so grateful for your presence here on the podcast. Truly, your work is so fascinating. I will be making sure to link everything in the show notes, but it's really such an honor to be able to speak to you, and I'm so grateful for your time today. So thank you for your work and for your wisdom.

Professor Beatriz Colomina 57:31

Thank you very much for your interview. You have very, very thoughtful questions, and it was a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Lyssia Katan 57:37

Thank you so much for spending this time with me on Broom2th. If you enjoyed this episode, feel free to follow the show, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who you think would really appreciate a more thoughtful approach to their space. You can find more Design Meets Psychology insights on social, in our community, and definitely in upcoming episodes so you can build a better life by design. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you next time.