Nils Weber is Max Planck PreDoc Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut and member of the research unit AC(H)E: Art Histories, Catastrophes, Heritage, Ecologies (Department Gerhard Wolf). He is PhD candidate and Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Art History at Heidelberg University.

Project Description:

Quarantine Architecture and the Mediterranean Sea in European and Middle Eastern Port Cities

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, the Ionian Islands, 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, 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 architecture that falls under this paradigm should be preserved today.

In a second project at Orient-Institut Beirut, Nils is working to build a research network that bridges European and Middle Eastern Art Histories in the Mediterranean, together with Gregor Meinecke and researchers at OIB.