Imperfect Health is a visually rich, thought-provoking exploration of the historical connections between health, design and the environment. Bringing together essays, photographs, and thematic entries, the book examines how architectural and urban thinking has been shaped by frameworks of Western medicine, often revealing tensions, uncertainties and contradictions. From early conceptions of the city as a diseased body to contemporary efforts to engineer well-being through design, the volume traces how architecture has been enlisted to diagnose, regulate and improve human life.

Published in conjunction with the CCA, Montreal, for the exhibition of the same title (curated by Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini), the book ultimately asks whether architecture should seek to cure at all. Should urbanism, landscape and building design aim to “heal,” or is another approach needed? Arguing for a critical reassessment of architecture’s therapeutic ambitions, Imperfect Health proposes a shift from cure to care – in which design supports well-being ethically and culturally – and invites readers to reconsider the ethical and political implications of medicalizing the built environment.

Essays range from “An Architectural Theory of Pollution” and studies of tuberculosis’s impact on modernism to examinations of obesity and lifestyle, revealing how architecture increasingly participates in defining, measuring and managing the healthy body.