In Search of Lost Time in Europe’s Sanatoriums (Published 2018) (2024)

“SICKNESS IS THE vacation of the poor,” the early 20th-century French poet Guillaume Apollinaire once said. Around that time, European factory workers routinely left their overcrowded and soot-congested cities for the Alps, where the air was fresh, dry and unsullied by inefficient machinery. They’d return to their grueling jobs rested, rejuvenated and, so the logic went, ready to work. The sojourns were doctor-prescribed, and the sites of revival — high-altitude sanatoriums, staffed with medical workers — were often state-funded. As dramatized in Vittorio De Sica’s 1973 film “A Brief Vacation,” Clara, a Calabrian mother of three living a wretched life in industrial Milan, contracts tuberculosis and is sent to a clinic in Lombardy, where, in addition to receiving X-rays and medication, she eats lavish meals, sleeps in clean white linens, has an affair with a fellow patient, makes glamorous friends and spends inordinate amounts of time bundled up on verandas staring at snow banks. “You shouldn’t read the papers,” she overhears one fellow patient advise another. “Things are so bad, they’ll raise your fever.”

It was a sentiment I found myself relating to this past summer, even as a 21st-century American with pathogen-free lungs and an occupation whose chief hazard isn’t respiratory illness but self-loathing. For a week — first in southeast Switzerland and then in the westernmost reaches of the Czech Republic — I padded around in slippers; brined myself in allegedly therapeutic waters; allowed stern women to wrap me, mummy-like, in blankets; and walked alone through the outskirts of ancient spa towns, blatantly ignoring the first lesson I was ever taught by a book: Don’t dilly-dally in Central European forests. I was massaged daily, ate meals at a two-Michelin-starred restaurant and took midday naps on the kind of “splendid” reclining chairs that so delight Hans Castorp, the malingering protagonist of Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.” It was obscene. Nothing, though — no rare mountain cheese, no spa treatment — compared to the novelty and thrilling debauchery of not reading the news.

The 60-plus years between the identification of tuberculosis’s cause and the discovery of its cure was, in retrospect, a sort of golden period for a very specific mode of architecture, as well as a very specific way of life. The Pennsylvania physician Thomas Kirkbride’s 19th-century mental asylums — designed with staggered wings and extensive landscaping — as well as the radial prisons of the same era, influenced the exteriors of these early sanatoriums. Their interiors, meanwhile, were kept simple and easy to clean. Many of the features we now associate with Modernism — flat roofs, large windows, terraces — were implemented earlier as functional methods for granting tuberculosis patients unrestricted access to light and air, thought at the time to be salubrious.

Alvar Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium in Finland, completed in 1933 at the height of the International Style movement, remains one of the best examples. He called the building a “medical instrument” and custom-designed every detail: Latches that wouldn’t catch on doctors’ lab-coat sleeves replaced ordinary doorknobs, plywood wardrobes were raised off the floor for easier cleaning, washbasins were designed to reduce splashing noises so consumptive roommates wouldn’t be wakened from their mandated rests, radiant heat panels in the ceiling minimized drafts and balconies were oriented for optimal sun exposure. Other Modernist sanatoriums include the Klinik Clavadel in Davos, Josef Hoffmann’s Purkersdorf Sanatorium outside of Vienna and Jan Duiker and Bernard Bijvoet’s Sanatorium Zonnestraal, which was commissioned by the Amsterdam diamond workers’ union in 1919 and whose name means “sunbeam” in Dutch. Toured by architecture students and described in the leading industry journals of the day, these sanatoriums’ influence can be seen in some of the most celebrated buildings of the 20th century. The public housing projects for which Le Corbusier would become famous included large terraces that may have been inspired by a visit the architect paid to a clinic in Leysin, Switzerland. Even the iconic bentwood recliners manufactured by firms like Thonet were commonly used at — and quickly became associated with — sanatoriums, as they were durable enough to move in and out of doors and could withstand the corroding effects of disinfectants.