Volume 69: Stress Management

It’s easy to find stress around us all, specifically at this moment – to manage it is something different. Architecture’s most fundamental task has been to manage stress: designing structures that oppose gravitational pull through load-bearing and shaping spaces that transform the pressures of living and working into spaces we can inhabit. But architecture does not only manage stress; it also produces it – depleting materials through extraction, leaving exhausted landscapes in its wake, as well as overworked, stressed-out bodies in and around the profession.

For VOLUME 69: Stress Management, we examine how these pressures converge and how architecture both absorbs and exerts them. In this issue of VOLUME, stress appears in many different forms and situations. We encounter post-earthquake scaffolding that keeps buildings and cities in a prolonged state of suspension; migrant shelters that respond to stressed bodies through care, food, and rest; and the everyday stress of workplaces. Other contributions reflect on wellness infrastructures, ecological practices, fungal decay, lithium landscapes, data centers, and extractive territories, showing how stress is not always eliminated but displaced, redistributed, or maintained over time.

Yet, V69’s approach to stress is not so solemn all of the time. While flipping through the pages of the magazine, you will find mandalas to color as a way to unwind, a crossword, a collection of objects for stress management, and quotes scattered throughout where architects index the everyday anxieties they encounter in their design practice – interruptions that create buffer zones to provide some form of relief. All of this in close collaboration with our new graphic designer, Miquel Hervás Gómez.