ABSTRACT
Health was one of modernism’s central motifs, from the improvement of the built environment and the formulation of aesthetic theory, to the institution of social reform. The origins of modernism’s health consciousness can be found in the nineteenth-century public health movement, which brought cities under scrutiny as pollution and squalid urban industrial living conditions caused mass epidemics of contagious disease. Modernist architecture in the early twentieth century thus focused on medical and structural efforts to banish the crowded, disease-ridden quarters of the nineteenth century and usher in an era of sanitary transparency that kept surfaces clean and spaces open to sun, air, and light. Although the concern for the impact of the built environment on health goes back to classical antiquity, no previous architectural movement was as preoccupied with health. 1 The modernist ideal was health-giving nature but, if urban life was the lived reality for most people, then it was to be clinical, orderly, and scrubbed free of disease.
