Quarantine Architecture and the Memorialisation of Post-Pandemic Heritage: Venice, Malta, Beirut

Quarantine measures and their architectural implementation have their origins in the specific ecological conditions of the Venetian Lagoon. In the fifteenth century, the Venetian government started to build simple housing structures and a hospital on the island of Santa Maria di Nazareth to isolate arriving sea merchants in a confined space for forty days (quaranta giorni), using the spatial separation between the smaller islands and the city within the archipelago. After this concept proved effective in combating diseases such as plague, it was quickly adopted by port cities around the Mediterranean Sea. To investigate the trajectory of this idea, this project aims to provide an analysis of quarantine architecture through comparative case studies from the Eastern and Western Mediterranean, including Venice, Malta and Beirut.

This transregional approach will demonstrate, first, how the idea of quarantine was shaped by local traditions and political contexts; second, how the search for best practices simultaneously transcended national borders and initiated transcultural cooperations; and third, how the basic concepts of quarantine architecture remained relatively uniform until the groundbreaking developments of vaccines at the end of the nineteenth century.

In Beirut, for example, the area of Karantina was built in the 1830s near the city’s port as a measure against the cholera pandemic. Severely damaged in the 2020 Beirut port explosion and currently under reconstruction, this case study also offers the possibility to explore the concept of post-pandemic heritage and to consider how sites that fall under this paradigm should be preserved today.