THE BRIEF

The Form of Wellbeing – a Sum of Parts
We are becoming increasingly aware of the need for a healthy environment, of the problems of pollution, obesity, global warming, loneliness; the destruction of species and the emergence of super bugs that have touched and impacted on all of us in recent times. We are now very much aware of the need for exercise, sunlight, vitamins, contact with nature and social bonds. Even governments are shifting from their two-dimensional metric measuring national life from GDP to a wellbeing economy, putting the wellbeing of people and the planet first. It’s about a holistic prosperity for humanity not only around our economy, our society, our environment and habitats but also our physical and mental health.

So how can our architecture and the spaces and landscape we inhabit, respond to this new consciousness?
Ancient cultures have already explored this. The Asclepieon, situated outside Epidaurus, was the most celebrated healing centre dating from the third or fourth century BC. It was a place where one went to be cured: a total landscape of wellbeing, built around a health centre. Embracing temples, clinics, landscape, houses for sleeping and dream cures as well as an athletics stadium, it was of course, also a theatre for cultural, spiritual, and physical catharsis. The views out to sea and the captivating landscape were as much a part of the healing process as were the health treatments. Over the years a revival of these ideals of a healthy city have emerged in response to poverty, plague, over development and war. The early modernists created an architecture of clinical precision, light and air, in which the interior merged into an exterior framed by trees and greenery. The anthroposophists created an architecture based on observation of the essential, living world and in the strengthening of the mental-spiritual qualities of man; in the observation of the mineral, plant, animal and human world and in the observation, and above all strengthening, of one’s own thinking, feeling and will. Health was always at the heart of the project but was very much part of wider milieu. More recently, with the medicalisation of pivotal moments: life, birth, old age and death, the idea of an architecture for health was extracted from the mainstream of construction and ghettoised into the modern hospital and clinic, a sterile environment with its focus on healing, shifting towards an institution.

Has this “ghettoisation” of the architecture of health led to a wholesale forgetting of the importance of wellbeing in the architecture of the everyday?
In recent years, our understanding of health has progressed into an appreciation of “wellbeing”. In architecture, this transition could not be more pronounced: it is the move away from the functionalist constraints of an aesthetic of hygiene, to a contemporary situation in which architecture, technology, interiors and the environment are entwined in a symbiotic relationship with occupants which will evolve, envisaging a future too different from our present.

So how will how “wellbeing” manifest and evolve in the things we touch, the places we live, the places we heal and the towns and cities we live in?
In responding to this brief, students are also invited to consider Architects for Health’s three content streams for 2022: ‘Dream’, ‘Build’ and ‘Heal’. These streams explore the evolutionary, revolutionary and the practical, creating scope for students from a wide range of disciplines to submit responses – either individually or collectively. Collaboration with other design disciplines is also welcome.
More details on each stream are available here: – https://www.architectsforhealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/2022_LeadershipStreams_INTRO_RevB.pdf