‘Design and Healing’ Shows How Epidemics Lead to Innovation – The New York Times

“Design and Healing” shows how the MASS Design Group has brought the lessons learned by Nightingale and Snow into the 21st century via clinics for Gheskio in Haiti, where reliable clean water and power are lacking. A tuberculosis clinic channels natural airflow to patient rooms and a healing garden through handsome grillwork made by local artisans. The undulating roof of a cholera clinic harvests rainwater and draws in daylight. It cleans its contaminated sewage with an anaerobic reactor that sanitizes by biological means.

Of the uncountable masks that amateur sewers and professional garment makers have created to filter breath, the handful on view show elegant adaptations of turbans (designed by Timzy Batra) and hijabs (created by Halima Aden). The Icelandic artist Ýrúrarí produced a knit mask that is demonstrative if not especially effective: Two pink tongues emerge from gritted teeth and lipsticked lips and curl up as if to press the mask around the nose, a humorous acknowledgment of how inept people are — well, I am, anyway — at getting their masks to seal properly. Other masks express political views: One bearing the phrase “I can’t breathe” checks the anti-police-brutality box while underlining Covid’s frequent devastation of the lungs.

A photo of children’s tiny heads peering out from a tanklike iron lung much like the one displayed reminds me of how scared I was of polio as a kid, and why I was more than willing to get jabbed with the polio vaccine, which was widely regarded as a miracle in the late 1950s.

Yet those breathing-assistance machines, in a less monstrous-looking form, are making a comeback. The exhibition makes the case that the external pressure applied by new, more portable and less intimidating versions of the iron lung, such as Shaash, a negative-pressure ventilator on display here. It was designed and produced by the Bangladesh firm Karnaphuli Industries and is less damaging to the body than ventilators that require physically invasive intubation and sometimes long-term sedation.