The book’s lengthy discussion of the responses from architects to the scourge of tuberculosis in 19th-century Europe certainly evokes the Covid era in the way designers speculated in line with emerging medical understanding. In one chapter, Altenhof considers sanatorium design in Davos, Switzerland, which he marks as a fundamental shift in thinking in “the way it redefined architecture not as protective wrapper but as a facilitator of the atmosphere itself as the primary space of human habitation.”

The Queen Alexandra Sanatorium, designed by the architects Otto Wilhelm Pfleghard and Max Haefeli in 1909, placed patients in individual rooms with south-facing balconies and elaborate windows that were forever open, allowing for maximum air changes in each room (buttressed with radiators for thermal comfort, if not energy efficiency). Doctors theorized that dry, cold mountain air, sanitized by nearby pine trees, would speed recovery. Pfleghard and Haefeli’s design realized, in Altenhof’s view, a “seamless body of air throughout, creating a fluid environment” that contrasts architecture’s traditional role in moderating air intake and exhaust for environmental comfort and ventilation. The implications for how we treat the wider environment to which our buildings, and bodies, relate had never been clearer.

Breathing Space is a tight book that does not meander much beyond late 19th- and early 20th-century German-Swiss influences, like Heinrich Wölfflin or Sigfried Giedion, with occasional classics like Alberti or British provocateurs like Reyner Banham peppered throughout. Altenhof is an architect and senior scientist in architectural theory and history at the University of Innsbruck, and the book is based on his doctoral thesis from Yale University. His expansive mingling of art history, architecture, popular media, and scientific inquiry—spiced up with digressions into obscure 19th-century cults and the German penchant for nudism—reveals some startlingly fresh insights into a topic so common as to appear banal.

This mingling works well when Altenhof assesses the 1921 Steinberg, Herrmann & Co. Hat Factory, where the German architect Erich Mendelsohn created a dye-works building that solved chemical exhaust problems. Rather than reengineering the use of fans, which had not worked effectively to keep workers safe at other facilities, Mendelsohn designed the entire factory as a chimney, with an exaggerated structure that passively funneled exhaust up and out. Altenhof includes insights from Mendelsohn’s wife, Luise, as well as critics and contemporaries, to situate the building in what he formulates as the book’s primary contribution, the concept of “respiratory modernism.”

Mendelsohn’s factory functions as a chimney. Image courtesy the publisher, click to enlarge.

In Altenhof’s view, respiratory modernism represents the emergence of a new architecture that centers on the breathing human not as a passive occupant but as a physiological actor within extensive atmospheric systems, at the urban or even planetary scale. He returns often to Le Corbusier’s fascination with representing human lungs in relation to buildings and cities to reinforce this view of our bodies as seamlessly connected to the natural world and the way architecture shapes exchange between the two.

While many recent books have functioned as correctives to modern architecture’s embrace of problematic technologies—for instance, air-conditioning as a cause of and solution to global warming—Altenhof has given us an excellent history lesson that carves out a small place for breathing. It is not a book specifically about technology or a comprehensive survey of ventilation and human health. Altenhof tells the origin story of this subject in Western thought, with language for describing what it means to breathe within architectural space. Sorry to put it this way, but it’s a breath of fresh air.