Beatriz Colomina & Mark Wigley

This conversation was first published for OPEN Architecture Festival, Issue Five (2025): In the Eyes of the Ordinary.

In conversation with Ida Bjerga & Osmo Hadad-Lange 
Written by Ida Bjerga

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes.

Health is increasingly understood through the lens of the microbiome—the trillions of microbes that sustain and protect us every day. But what happens when we shift that lens to architecture? What does it mean to think about buildings in terms of microbiomes?

Beatriz Colomina is a globally recognised architectural historian and theorist whose work spans architecture, art, technology, sexuality, and media. She is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of Architecture at Princeton University and the founding director of its interdisciplinary Media and Modernity Programme. Mark Wigley is a historian, theorist, and critic working at the intersection of architecture, art, philosophy, culture, and technology. He is Professor of Architecture and Dean Emeritus at Columbia University. Together, Colomina and Wigley co-curated the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial in 2016 under the theme Are We Human?. Most recently, they collaborated on the 2025 Milan Triennale with the exhibition We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture and in the 2025 Venice Biennale with the installation The Other Side of the Hill.

In their work, they argue that architecture has always been entangled with biological life—particularly microbes—and challenge modernity’s obsession with cleanliness. Rather than viewing microbes as threats, they propose we see them as co-inhabitants, even co-designers, who shape how we live, build, and think. We (virtually) sat down with them to talk microbiomes and architecture, and to try to understand just how alive architecture really is. What follows is a text based on our conversation in June 2025.

B: It’s almost common knowledge today that we need a healthy microbiome. Most of us know we shouldn’t be eating junk food, and that we’re supposed to eat more fresh vegetables and fruits. People are taking probiotics, drinking kefir, brewing kombucha—and who knows what. On a popular level, there’s an awareness that we need to take care of our gut, and that there’s a link between the gut and the brain, the gut and mental health, the gut and all sorts of diseases. We’re seeing an increasing number of modern conditions—autism, allergies, depression, obesity, autoimmune disorders, and many forms of cancer—tied to an unhealthy microbiome.

M: But what most people don’t seem to quite understand yet is just how much architecture has contributed to the diminishing diversity of bacteria in our gut, and how this loss of microbial diversity, driven by our built environment, has contributed to a massive decline in human health.

I: But let’s rewind a bit…

B: Architecture has caused illness from the very beginning, going as far back as the Neolithic period—ever since we started going indoors and constructing sealed structures. The moment we moved indoors, diseases that had existed quietly for centuries, but had never been a problem, suddenly became widespread epidemics. Tuberculosis, for instance, along with many others, became endemic as a result of going indoors.

M: And to build on that—when we talk today about poor indoor air quality, we have to remember that the very idea of “indoor air” is only about 10,000 years old. Humans only began constructing interiors fully separated from the outdoors around that time, which, in planetary terms, is just a few seconds ago. So this concept of “indoors” is a very recent idea. And, as it turns out, it’s kind of a disastrous one.

B: In fact, already in 1884, in the context of a huge international health exhibition in London, a doctor remarked that “man in constructing protection from the elements has created the conditions for disease.” He may not have had much evidence at the time, but he was absolutely right. Recent excavations from the first Neolithic houses show skeletons with signs of tuberculosis.

THE SANATORIUM MOVEMENT

B: Bacteria were only recognised as the cause of disease—as the enemy—in the late 19th century. And from that point on, architecture became resolutely antibacterial. Bacteria were demonised, and with good reason. People were dying of bacterial diseases at an unprecedented rate throughout the 19th and well into the 20th century. One in three people in major cities like Paris or London was dying of tuberculosis in the middle of the 19th century. And there was no medication for TB until a century later.

In response, architects took it upon themselves to protect people from disease. That response took the form of modern architecture: open buildings with large terraces for sun and ventilation, and separation from the ground—all designed as forms of prevention strategies against disease.

The first effective antibiotic treatments for tuberculosis did not arrive until 1943. But due to the war, and the time it took to distribute the drugs globally, people continued to die of tuberculosis well into the mid-20th century. In the absence of a cure, people recovered in sanatoriums—and those sanatoriums also helped prevent the spread of many other diseases. But more importantly, modern architecture, in many ways, saved millions of lives.

AN ONGOING CAMPAIGN AGAINST BACTERIA

B: Antibiotics, too, saved millions of lives—there’s no question about that. But they also introduced a new set of problems, one of the biggest being the diminishing diversity of bacteria and the rise of antimicrobial resistance. Modern architecture also created its own monsters. It became increasingly hermetic, more closed off from the outdoors, with artificial ventilation and a lack of fresh air.

M: And inside the home, we assembled a whole arsenal of chemicals, tools, brushes, and equipment—all designed to fight bacteria. In a way, we’ve all become enemies of bacteria. In fact, we’re every day engaged in a slow, ongoing, genocidal campaign against bacteria.

Of course, bacteria were only identified as the cause of disease in the late 19th century. But in the 20th century, we began to understand that they were also the cause of health. So we are only just starting to understand what microbes actually are. We’ve had 10,000 years of architecture and permanent living indoors, but only a little over a century of even trying to understand bacteria.

B: And it wasn’t until the early 21st century that the first theories about the microbiome—and the idea of microbial health—began to make an impact at a popular level. So if architecture and health have always been connected, what happens now, in this moment, when our understanding of health is starting to change? What is healthy architecture?

WE THE BACTERIA

M: Architecture was meant to be a home for humans, not for bacteria. But that’s where it gets tricky. Because humans are microbial—which is to say, bacterial. Each of us carries around a hundred trillion microbes. And it’s not just that we’re filled with them—we’re made of them. Every cell in our body is maintained by microbes. The oxygen we breathe is produced by bacteria. The world around us only exists because of bacteria. Life itself began with microbes some 4.5 billion years ago. In fact, nothing could be more ordinary than bacteria, because everything is bacteria.

Take the immune system, for example. Many of us carry microbes linked to major diseases, but they don’t cause problems because the immune system is already full of beneficial bacteria that occupy space. And when we acquire older microbes, ones that have been around for millions of years, they actually teach the newer ones what to do. Even if the new ones haven’t faced a specific threat or disease before, the old ones know how to guide a defense. Our immune system keeps us healthy not by throwing out bacteria, but by allowing most of them to stay—or even by inviting new ones in.

The microbial world is a world of entanglements—a system of relationships. A kind of world where different species live together and depend on each other. Modern architecture, you could say, was the opposite of that—it was about disentanglement, about separation. But what we’re starting to understand now is that healthy architecture would be the same as a healthy microbiome: a very biodiverse community of microbes. The problem is that, because of this long history of separation—because of modern architecture and this slow genocide against bacteria—we now have only half the microbial diversity we had before we invented architecture. Ten thousand years ago, we had twice as many microbes. This loss makes us very, very vulnerable. And right now, some of our scientific colleagues are saying this is an even bigger problem than climate change.

BIOTIC ARCHITECTURE

M: I suppose we are historians and teachers, so our job is to highlight the central role that bacteria have played—even long before they were recognised as such. That’s why we try to write a different history.

B: Only very recently have people begun to talk about the possibility of a more biotic architecture. With our exhibition We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture, at the 24th Milan Triennale, we show that bacteria are all about diverse interdependent communities—and that we need to rethink what architecture means from the perspective of bacteria.

The final section of the exhibition presents a range of experiments and speculative practices by contemporary architects exploring how architecture might become more biotic. One example is the work of Andrés Jaque, whose Escuela Infantil El Chaparral (El Chaparral Kindergarten) in Madrid was one of his early experiments in microbes. It’s a school designed not just for children, but for entire ecosystems. He used microbial and ecological principles to attract birds and insects to support trans-species life around the school—it’s really beautiful. But there were many other examples from all over the world, such as Paulo Tavares, a Brazilian architect and researcher working on spatial justice, Indigenous epistemologies, and the politics of the Amazon; Lydia Kallipoliti, a Greek architect, scholar, and theorist based in the U.S., known for her work on closed systems and environmental design; Philippe Rahm, a Swiss architect working with thermodynamics, atmosphere, and invisible forms of environmental design; and Daniela Mitterberger, an Austrian architect and researcher based in the U.S., whose work investigates synthetic ecologies and post-human materialities. Each brought a unique approach to what we call the “Petri-dish”—a collective platform of material experiments and alternative architectural ways of doing. But the point is: there can never be one solution. There’s never one answer. It’s always multiple attempts to do something differently.

NO PERFECT HOTEL FOR MICROBES

M: A huge problem we face today is that architecture has become a kind of monoculture. Buildings look the same everywhere, built from the same materials extracted from across the globe. They’re insensitive to the world around them—almost like spaceships. So what is healthy architecture? Well, as we’ve said before, it would be like a healthy microbiome. Each of us carries around 100 trillion microbes, but each of us has a combination that’s much more unique than a fingerprint. Thinking in microbial terms means thinking in terms of specific communities. And then the question becomes: how do you care for a community? Architecture, then, shouldn’t be about the individual client of a particular house, or even just the citizens of a city. It should respond to the shifting, complex needs of microbial life. And if microbes are now the real clients, there’s no one solution—no perfect hotel for microbes.

M: There are so many ways to begin thinking about this. One concrete example is when humans moved indoors 10,000 years ago, we separated ourselves from the soil. But it is at the top ten centimetres of the soil that about 25% of the planet’s microbes live. Humans grew up in the soil like a plant—we’re kind of like plants, right? With architecture, we separated ourselves from the soil—and thereby from the microbial world. Today, if you live in a city, you almost never see or touch soil. And when you do, it’s often been treated with antibiotics, pesticides, or other chemicals. So, if we think about biotic architecture, maybe the first step is to bring the soil back inside—along with plants, animals, and other species. And once you do that, the whole meaning of “indoors” begins to change. The responsibility is no longer to find a perfect solution, but to have everyone do different things. Encourage multiple attempts to try to do something, because there can never be just one answer.

THINK IN, THROUGH, AND WITH BACTERIA

M: We think the real shift begins with mindset. If you start to think of yourself as microbial, as being a guest of your microbes, it changes everything. It’s not that you have microbes; it’s that microbes have you. You’re just lucky to hang out within their world.

When you breathe, when you eat, you’re receiving nutrients from the world through your gut—and it’s microbes that digest those nutrients, making them available to you. They regulate your entire system. Your intestines are directly connected to your brain. So even if we like to think humans are special because we can think, it’s actually the microbes doing the thinking. Part of what we’re saying is: if you start thinking in, through, and with bacteria, the concept of the ordinary changes. So does the concept of the extraordinary. The more you learn about bacteria, the more amazing it is! It’s simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary. And once you learn about bacteria and the bacterial community—it’s kind of hard to be interested in humans again.

So, if you decide: okay, I’m going to be sensitive to the complicated, ever-changing needs of microbes—then architecture can no longer stay the same. Imagine an interior starting with bacteria. Then the question becomes: how does the bacteria maintain the room? It has to bring things in from the outside. But there wasn’t an outside before bacteria—so it invents one. Today, architecture appears to be about creating an inside. But maybe it’s actually about imagining an outside. So we end on this question: how might we imagine the outside in the future?

I hope we imagine it differently. Because otherwise, we’re dead.

This conversation was first published for OPEN Architecture Festival, Issue Five (2025): In the Eyes of the Ordinary.

The issue was produced by students from the Aarhus School of Architecture:
Ida Bjerga, Osmo Hadad-Lange, Alexander Skovgaard Bagger Hadi, and Birke Langkjær Jakobsen.

The non-profit project was supported by The Dreyer Foundation.

Image credits: 1) Muhsin Akgün, 2) CDC, 3) DSL Studio, 4) Clark van Der Beken, 5) DSL Studio, 6) CDC