For a recent review in the New York Review of Architecture, Izzy Kornblatt discusses Breathing Space: The Architecture of Pneumatic Beings by Tim Altenhof. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“Metaphors abound in Tim Altenhof’s wholly original Breathing Space (Zone Books, 2026). The Victorian-era eggheads to whom the book introduces us—the German scientist Max von Pettenkofer and the American ventilation expert Lewis W. Leeds, to name but two examples—readily equate walls with porous skin and rooms with mechanical lungs. There is, for Altenhof, a through line from these earlier obscure figures to the obsessive attempts by architects like Erich Mendelsohn and Le Corbusier to measure, control, and facilitate air circulation. This project of “disciplining” breathing has a sinister ring; indeed, it was at this time that airborne poisons were deployed at an unprecedented scale, making respiration more lethal than ever before.”