Society of Architectural Historians SAH Conference in Austin, Texas
April 9 - 13, 2014

Panel: Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body

Recent museum exhibitions and academic publications have explored the
multifaceted relationship between the built environment and the body
in the modern era of public health. The Canadian Center for
Architecture’s 2011-2012 exhibition Imperfect Health: The
Medicalization of Architecture, for example, made a case for the
paradox of new emphases on “public architectures of health” while
globalized social change has made healing spaces a privilege of the
rich. Meanwhile, the Palm Springs Art Museum’s Backyard Oasis: The
Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945-1982 hinted at
a historical relationship between visual culture, new anxieties about
the body, and the growth of prefab suburban homes after World War II.
In the context of the postwar Sunbelt, at least, consumerism and the
family backyard produced awkward quests for natural health in
inherently unnatural settings. This new work builds upon a growing
field that has focused on modern preoccupations with the healthy body
and a corresponding therapeutic architecture.

We are interested in expanding the field to include ways that
architects, urban planners, physicians, social reformers, and civil
servants have engaged with the architecture of healing and the body,
as well as strategic ways that urban dwellers have modified their
living environments themselves to create a kind of vernacular health
architecture from the late nineteenth century onwards. We encourage
submissions that interrogate unusual ways of thinking about the
political economy of health and the body, nature and natural
environments, and international concerns about urban design and
physical well-being. Session chairs: Sarah Schrank
sarah.schrankcsulb.edu (California State University, Long Beach) and
Didem Ekici Didem.Ekicinottingham.ac.uk (University of Nottingham).

Click here for the SAH online submission process:
https://sah.conference-services.net/authorlogin.asp?conferenceID=3674&language=en-uk
For more information regarding the SAH conference:
http://www.sah.org/conferences-and-programs/2014-conference---austin