In January 1938, Le Corbusier’s landmark exhibition Œuvre plastique 1919–1937: tableaux et architecture opened at the Kunsthaus Zürich. Although the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin had been invited by his former doctoral student Sigfried Giedion, he chose instead to remain in the mountains, avoiding a personal encounter with Le Corbusier. This anecdote serves as a point of departure for examining how all three figures mobilized the metaphor of breathing in their respective works. Giedion occupies a pivotal position in this constellation, having studied under Wölfflin and devoted his first monograph to the architecture of Le Corbusier. My talk situates their writings within a broader cultural preoccupation with breathing that emerged during this period, which I conceptualize as respiratory modernism.
Tim Altenhof is a Berlin-based architect, teacher, and author, currently serving as a senior scientist in architectural theory at the University of Innsbruck, where he will take up a professorship in March 2027. He holds degrees from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Yale University, where his dissertation was awarded the Theron Rockwell Field Prize in 2018. An excerpt of this work also won the Bruno Zevi Prize 2018. He is the author of Breathing Space: The Architecture of Pneumatic Beings (Zone Books, 2026).
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