Abstract
With significant relevance to the Covid-19 pandemic, this paper contributes to emerging 'aerographic' research on the socio-materialities of air and breath, based on an in-depth empirical study of three hospital-based lung infection clinics treating people with cystic fibrosis. We begin by outlining the changing place of atmosphere in hospital design from the pre-antibiotic period and into the present. We then turn to the first of three aerographic themes where air becomes a matter of grasping and visualising otherwise invisible airborne infections. This includes imagining patients located within bodily spheres or 'cloud bodies', conceptually anchored in Irigaray's thoughts on the 'forgetting of the air' and Sloterdijk's immunitary 'spherology' of the body. Our second theme explores the material politics of air, air conditioning, window design and the way competing 'air regimes' come into conflict with each other at the interface of buildings, bodies and the biotic. Our final theme attends to the 'cost of air', the aero-economic problem of atmospheric scarcity within modern high-rise, deep-density healthcare architectures.
Highlights
As this paper went to press in April 2020, the world had entered the early phases of a global viral pandemic without precedent in living memory
That includes people with cystic fibrosis (CF) and other conditions who are vulnerable to lung infections increasingly resistant to antibiotics
We suggest that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has focussed interest in these fields on the atmospheric attributes of healthcare architectures across time (‘pre-to-post-antibiotic’)
Summary
As this paper went to press in April 2020, the world had entered the early phases of a global viral pandemic without precedent in living memory. Much of the policy engagement with AMR has focussed on aspects of human ‘behaviour’ especially prescribing and patient ‘compliance’ (Chandler 2019, Will 2018), while less attention has been directed at the socio-material nature/s of healthcare architectures (Brown et al 2019, Martin et al 2015) We respond to this aspect of AMR by focussing on the built environment of clinical space, taking into account changes in contemporary healthcare buildings and the layered atmospheric histories of ventilation and ‘air hygiene’. This includes a detailed consideration of localised practices where air is both a focus for microbial anxiety, and infection management. We want to return to the way AMR potentially creates an imaginative historical space with which to rethink the shared atmospheres of human and biotic bodies
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