The submission of papers for the six thematic sessions is open to all participants of the V International Seminar on Hospital Architecture History (V SIHAH).
The modern design of a protected life, assuming a passive body constructed individually in the disease-health opposition, focuses on the elimination of disease through the use of the hospital as a fundamental device for biomedical knowledge and intervention. However, health is permanently reinvented through its social, ecological, and political dimensions, and the medicalization of life centered on the individual is expanding into spaces composed of less static and more complex visions, problematized by (re)emerging challenges such as the recent Covid-19 pandemic.
From a biomedical perspective, maintaining health status focuses on the individual's relationship with biomedicine and daily practices associated with preventive medicine and health promotion, avoiding hospital stays centered on curing diseases. We know today that physical activity, sea bathing, hot/cold energy, swimming, or the gym are part of individual health experiences, but they also fit into the social and collective construction of health. Shelter, "comfort temperature," or the interior-exterior continuity of a transparent building, free from the constraints of walls and ceilings, reflect shifts in perspective resulting from economic and health governance logics that coexist and accompany the reinvention of biomedicine and public health in response to challenges in various parts of the world. The transition from curative to preventive medicine reflects a "Copernican revolution" in how we view the body: from curing a sick body in need of therapy to maintaining a healthy body, in a permanent effort and attention to the slightest signs or symptoms of degeneration, pain, or changes in form or texture.
