In the short span of forty years, hospitals became ubiquitous in Western society. Today, the hospital seems nearly invisible, even though it bookends the beginning and end of most people’s lives. But initially this institution was met with opposition from a host of critics and commentators.

This talk focuses on Vienna in the twentieth century as the privileged site for this exemplary tale about the hospital’s rise, the suspicions it generated, and the experiences it occasioned. The Architecture of Illness investigates various hospital building styles, as these come to influence people’s experiences of health care. Using examples from literary works by Arthur Schnitzler and Rainer Maria Rilke as well as architectural treatises, this talk charts the waiting games, the diffuse spaces, and the contagious rumors that plague hospitals from the moment of their establishment.


Fatima Naqvi is Leavenworth Professor of German and Film at Yale University. She is currently the chair of the Film & Media Studies Program as well as of the European Studies Council. Her scholarship has focused on the intersection of architecture and Bildung in the literature of Thomas Bernhard; landscape and its function in post-war West German culture; the rhetoric of victimhood in Western European Culture from the late 1960s to the present; and the films of director Michael Haneke. Drawn to the curmudgeons, querulous types, and naysayers of literature and film, she has recently written on Elfriede Jelinek, Ruth Beckermann, Friederike Mayröcker, and Peter Handke.