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When everyday environments become anxious spaces

Social anxiety disorder isolates those who experience it. Part of the solution is to design public spaces with mental health in mind.

Designing better mental health wards

Bringing colour and natural light to tired, grubby mental health wards has a measurably positive effect on patients. A few groundbreaking projects are showing the way.

Designing death in the virtual city

Danger and death are fun when they’re virtual – and when they incorporate realistic elements. Now the tables are turned, as urban planners learn from game environments.

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.

This is what changed my approach to interior design

An interior designer examines how emotions and cognitive activity influenced her designs, and argues that spaces reflect the people within.

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.

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.

Living with less for spiritual gain

Today, a minimalist lifestyle is trumpeted as a route to happiness. Find out what religious ascetics from history and modern proponents of the spartan-looking home can teach us.

How light pollution affects our circadian rhythms

Too much of the wrong sort of light can send our natural cycles off-kilter – is city life messing with your circadian rhythm?

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.

Of incubators, orchids and artificial wombs

In this extract from Claire Horn’s new book, ‘Eve: The Disobedient Future of Birth’, she traces the development of the artificial womb, soon to become a reality.

Graveyards as green getaways

Stressed city dwellers have been visiting cemeteries in greater numbers since the start of the pandemic. Discover how, despite the constant reminders of death, graveyards bring visitors a sense of renewal.

Divining the world through an artist’s almanac

Amanda Couch's artists book, 'Huwawa in the Everyday: an almanac' is inspired by the entrail like folds of a medieval folding and its function as a guide for astrological divinations linking the body, health and the heavens. Like the original almanac her work is designed to be carried out into the wider world.

The ambivalence of air

Daisy Lafarge investigates the effects of air quality and pressure on body and mind, exploring air as cure, but one with contradictions.

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.

Intelligence testing, race and eugenics

Specious ideas and assumptions about intelligence that were born during the great flourishing of eugenics well over 100 years ago still inform the British education system today, as Nazlin Bhimani reveals.

Reversing the psychiatric gaze

Nineteenth-century psychiatrists were keen to categorise their patients’ illnesses reductively – by their physical appearance. But we can see a far more complex picture of mental distress, revealed by those patients able to express their inner worlds in art.

A history of gestation outside the body

It’s been over 400 years since a Swiss alchemist theorised that foetuses could develop outside the womb. Claire Horn examines incubator technology past and present, and explores the possibilities recent prototypes might bring.

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.

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.

The secrets your teeth hold

Discover how innocuous-looking human teeth hold a wealth of hidden information about our diet, health and evolution.

Can isolation lead to manipulation?

Military-funded researchers wanted to know if isolation techniques could facilitate brainwashing. One neuroscientist suggested that it might improve our own control over our minds.

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.

Our complicated love affair with light

Sunlight is essential, but our relationship with artificial light is less clear cut. It expands what’s possible; it also obscures and polices. In this long read, Lauren Collee pits light against night, and reveals the shady places in between.

Titans in the landscape