Public Health Themes in Survival Through Design: A Son’s Appreciation

Abstract

The Neutra Institute for Survival Through Design is about to republish my father’s book, Survival Through Design. It will have a scholarly forward by the historian Barbara Lamprecht relating the book’s concerns to current research on neuroscience and the environment. When it first came out in 1953, my own reading of this book as a junior high school student started me on my career in medicine and environmental public health. On reading it again, I am at first overcome by the tsunami of my father’s seemingly unconnected speculations, free associations, and insights. As a young person, I encountered them not only in this book but in decades of conversations with my father. Stepping back, it dawns on me that the book does have themes and that exposure to these themes that my father applied to architecture and city planning, prepared me to be receptive to similar themes in medicine and public health. Indeed, my father thought that architecture had much to learn from medicine and public health. So, I am now realizing that most of the ideas and free associations in this book can be organized into the following themes that fit both the design and the environmental health domains: The Plan Journal 5 (2): XXX-XXX, 2020 doi: 10.15274/tpj.2020.05.02.1