Breathing Space examines a widespread breathing culture around the turn of the twentieth century. It explores how this culture influenced modern architecture, both in theory and in the design of actual buildings. This breathing culture was marked by an intensified attention to all things respiratory: in medical debates over the treatment and prevention of tuberculosis; in modern dance and obscure religious movements that sought to reconnect body and mind in a rapidly industrializing society; in popular breathing systems addressing a general audience; and in the field of environmental hygiene, where reformers began to view human respiration itself as a source of indoor air pollution. Concerns about anthropogenic air pollution emerged alongside what we now think of as air pollution more broadly: the modification of the outside atmosphere through particles produced by human activity. In other words, the air we breathe can be at risk both inside and outside our buildings.

I call the resulting breathing culture and the architecture it produced respiratory modernism. It describes a new approach to modern architecture in which the consciously breathing subject is not seen as a passive inhabitant, but as an active agent engaging the surrounding atmosphere. In this sense, Breathing Space is a historic study that brings together various disciplines from architecture to art history, as well as medicine and popular culture, to think through the broader implications of breathing for the spaces that enclose us. This approach understands bodies and the natural world as intertwined, with architecture shaping the flow between them. The book’s title Breathing Space deliberately employs the present participle, which confuses the relation between subject and object. It is unclear whether space itself is breathing or if it is being breathed.

Ongoing thread. More from Tim Altenhof to follow.

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