It is a joy to be in tactile contact with a book as beautifully designed and lushly illustrated as this one. Published by Lars Müller, whom author Beatriz Colomina hails as “the last book maker” (199), this volume features a cleverly designed, double-layered cover that evokes its title, X-Ray Architecture. The strong graphic design and the 277 illustrations, many in color, that accompany the text are appropriate for a book written by a preeminent architectural historian and theorist known for her groundbreaking and sophisticated analysis of images.

Like other books by Colomina, this one had a long gestation. The author recounts that her main idea here—the intimate connections between architecture and illness—goes back to 1980, when she first arrived in New York and was inspired by the type of interdisciplinary scholarship characterized by Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor (1978). Besides noting that she “started seeing modern architecture in terms...

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