Y. L. Lucy Wang, Columbia University, Department of Art History and Archaeology, is the recipient of the 2024 Carter Manny Writing Award.

In 1894, as outbreaks of the Third Plague Pandemic ravaged British colonial Hong Kong, medical experts working on the ground uncovered the disease’s bacterial mechanics. The first significant public health changes on the heels of this development targeted the built environment, and in this way, bacterial transmission redefined hygienic space, prompting architects, physicians, land-surveyors, and engineers across the region to integrate new understandings of disease into their work. This dissertation traces the merging of medical and architectural expertise throughout Greater China, first in Hong Kong, a colonial site adjacent to the ailing Qing empire, and eventually in the nascent Republic of China (1912–49). Elsewhere within architectural history, hygiene’s stakes are well-established but predominantly address miasmic understandings of disease. In contrast, this project examines how, in the age of germ theory, medical experts and professional architects managed outbreaks, modernized architecture and infrastructure, and modulated between tradition and modernity.

Y. L. Lucy Wang is a PhD candidate at Columbia University in the department of art history and archaeology, specializing in modern architecture. In her writing, teaching, and curating, she focuses on Asia’s empires from maritime exchange to postcolony, with a particular interest in land administration and scientific knowledge. Her dissertation traces the emergence of professionalized architecture in the Greater China region (ca. 1894–1949), examining how a hygienic consciousness entered into architectural expertise. Wang was part of the curatorial team of The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985 in her role as The Museum of Modern Art’s 2021–22 Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow in the department of architecture and design. She has held various pedagogical leadership positions at COOKFOX Architects, Syracuse University, the Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning, and Architizer.