This exhibition juxtaposes the architectural race to dominate the skyline of the divided city of Berlin with the different strategies implemented in the East and West to combat airborne diseases and respond to epidemics and pandemics. The history of modern architecture and that of medicine are intertwined. Public health and personal hygiene were amongst the most powerful engines of modern architecture. It is thus no coincidence, as many observers have noted, that when the International Style emerged at the end of World War I, its white walls and cleansed surfaces resembled those of hospitals. If this similarity existed, it wasn’t only because of the war-wounded – though the Bauhaus did begin in Weimar in the same building as a hospital for them; it was also in response to the exceptionally deadly global pandemic of H1N1 influenza, also known as the »Spanish Flu« (1918–1920). The architectural and urban design of Weimar Republic modernism responded not only to an emerging new society, but to its coexistence with another species. Buildings, neighbourhoods and cities were designed to respond to the way viruses spread through aerosols across and through them. This exhibition explores the relation between viral contagion and spatial measures across these scales. We focus on the two great waves of influenza of the 20th century that followed the »Spanish Flu« and preceded the outbreaks of SARS (2002–2004) and COVID-19 (since 2020): the global pandemic of H2N2, also referred to as the »Asian Flu« (1957–1958), and that of H3N2 or the »Hong Kong Flu« (1968–1970). While these two outbreaks were less medically severe than either the »Spanish Flu« or the COVID-19 pandemic, they caused millions of deaths worldwide and engendered different architectural and urban responses on both sides of the Iron Curtain. »Light, Air and Viruses« is a pun on »Light, Air and Sunshine«, the famous slogan of the modernist architecture of the late Weimar Republic. This exhibition follows the Cold War’s architectural “arms race”: public buildings, tower blocks, boulevards, infrastructural projects and public amenities built to dominate the skyline of divided Berlin. This race also included medical measures and institutions built in response to viral pandemics that were, of course, impossible to view separately.