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How architecture builds a profession of stress

Architects might produce buildings that enhance our health, but at what cost? Kristin Hohenadel explores architecture’s pressurised and stressful culture.

The building as tool of healing

When we’re ill, it’s not just medical care that helps to treat us. Architects have discovered that the right environment can play an important part too.

Two health centres, two ideologies

Two futuristic, light-filled buildings aimed to bring forward-looking healthcare to city dwellers. But the principles behind each were very different.

The tower in fiction, film and life

The high-rise estates born of postwar idealism soon became symbols of crime and squalor. But after one terrible tragedy, public bodies are being forced to rethink our towers.

Building a dream in the garden suburbs

In the late 19th century a ‘garden suburb’ promised a retreat from London’s dirt and crowds. See how this new concept was developed to appeal to the health concerns of the literary classes.

Homes for the hives of industry

By building workers’ villages, industry titans demonstrated both philanthropy and control. Employees’ health improved, while rulebooks told them how to live ideal lives.

How slums make people sick

A newly gentrified corner of Bermondsey leaves little clue to its less salubrious history. But a few intrepid writers recorded the details of existence in one of London’s most squalid slums.

How I escaped my anxiety and depression through architecture and poetry

Social anxiety led him to introversion and silence. The brutalist architecture of London’s Barbican Estate inspired his liberation in poetry.

How to rehabilitate the concrete jungle

A huge concrete housing estate from the 1960s, now seen as an ecological mistake, is being drastically redeveloped, compounding the environmental errors. Owen Hatherley posits a more creative solution.

Titans in the landscape

The history of sanatoriums and surveillance

The sanatorium treatment for tuberculosis was a curious combination of sunshine, fresh air, exercise and constant surveillance.

A nose through Blythe House

Recently sold and emptied out, Blythe House was once one of the UK’s biggest museum storage facilities. Here, museum worker Laura Humphreys reflects on her relationship with the store’s architecture, objects and aromas.

The shape of thought

Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s description of the moment in 1887 when he saw a brain cell for the first time never fails to move neuroscientist Richard Wingate to tears. Here he captures that enduring sense of wonder.

Inside the mind of Living with Buildings curator, Emily Sargent

Curator Emily Sargent reveals why council estates and a Finnish TB sanatorium were chosen for the ‘Living with Buildings’ exhibition.

Silent threat

As Vanessa Peterson recovered from a frighteningly serious illness, she wondered whether it was linked to air quality. For many communities, she found, pollution is a political issue.

The art of soundproof design

Too much noise is more than annoying – it has serious negative effects on health and cognitive ability. Find out how designers and architects are mitigating the downsides of sound.

Happy Joy Smile

Drawn from real-life experiences, this short story depicts a character negotiating the UK’s current mental health system. Discover what happens as they encounter waiting lists, sketchy healthcare and punitive government bureaucracy.

The chymist’s trade card

An 18th-century trade card reveals far more than its owner may have intended.

John Walter on ‘Alien Sex Club’

I’m a painter, but I make worlds.

Dazzling luxury

As the 20th century dawned, both elite and masses basked in the marvellous and unearthly glow of the new electric illumination.

Native Americans through the 19th-century lens

The stories behind Rinehart's photographs may not be as black and white as they first appear.

When the sun goes down

Despite the country’s colonial and industrial dominion, the finest minds of Victorian Britain began to fear the devastating effects of declining natural resources. Even the death of the sun.

Desperate housewives and suburban neurosis

Discover how a pioneering health centre replaced housewives’ supposedly empty home lives with a social space that encouraged healthy child rearing.

The birth of the public museum

The first public museums evolved from wealthy collectors’ cabinets of curiosities and were quickly recognised as useful vehicles for culture.

Genius spirits and the mystery of creative inspiration

Once upon a time, we all had a genius.