I would not have thought of this, but Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com notes that architecture – how a building is laid out – can impact how, and whether, a pathogen spreads throughout a human population, an important consideration in this era of pathogens developing antibiotic resistance:
When writing about bathrooms in an earlier post, I suggested that Le Corbusier put a sink in the front hall of the Villa Savoye as an historical allusion. In fact, there is a much simpler and more straightforward reason: His client, like the clients for the Maison de Verre and the Lovell Health House, was a doctor and was obsessed about germs. People had known about germ theory since 1882, when Robert Koch identified that tuberculosis was caused by a bacillus, but they didn’t have antibiotics until after World War II.
Architecture, planning and public policy were surprisingly effective at dealing with disease, once it was figured out what caused it; in her book The Drugs Don’t work, Professor Dame Sally Davies writes:
Almost without exception, the decline in deaths from the biggest killers at the beginning of the twentieth century predates the introduction of antimicrobial drugs for civilian use at the end of the Second World War. Just over half the decline in infections diseases had occurred before 1931. The main influences on the decline of mortality were better nutrition, improved hygiene and sanitation, and less dense housing with all helped to prevent and to reduce transmission of infectious diseases.
Lloyd covers the opposing viewpoints of Le Corbusier and those who fought tuberculosis with air and sunlight, and also mentions SARS, spread through mists coming from various pieces of machinery. Coming to my mind are isolation units in hospitals, which have been used in an attempt to stop MSRA from spreading, barriers to pathogen spreading insects. Throughout history it seems like some cultures alternate between considering Nature as analogous to Eden, and an evil morass which kills our infants and cripples adults – think of FDR’s polio.
