This book does not seek to rationalize the current pandemic or speculate about its impact directly. Instead, it offers a wider, historical, and more complex discourse with which we may think about the present. It explores different dimensions of the relationships between concepts of illness, space, institutions, territories, technologies, politics, biologies, and philosophies.

‘Design (and architecture),’ here, means not just buildings, cities, and spaces, but structures of thinking, protocols and logics. And ‘pandemics’ means not just re-cognizable diseases but things not yet recognized or treated as disease. Both sickness and architecture need to be expanded and destabilized. To think the intimate relationship between them is to think both differently.