Architecture’s most fundamental task has been to manage stress: to design structures that oppose gravitational pull through load bearing and to shape 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, leaving exhausted landscapes, materials depleted by extraction in the relentless pursuit of productivity, as well as overworked, stressed-out bodies in and around the profession. 

For V69: Stress Management, we examine how these pressures converge and how architecture both absorbs and exerts them. Stress is no longer only a technical question of load and resistance, but a condition that moves between bodies and ecosystems. Stress management becomes a lens through which bodily, social, and environmental systems can be understood together. In this issue, we look at how architecture can understand, absorb, adapt to, or relieve stress. 

In the copy of VOLUME you hold in your hands, 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 look at wellness infrastructures, ecological practices, fungal decay, lithium landscapes, data centres, and extractive territories, showing how stress is not always eliminated but displaced, redistributed, or maintained over time. 

Alongside these examples, several contributions point towards affirmative approaches: showing practices of care and collaboration, how to repair ecologies, and give space to slow, collective practices that transform pressure into new forms of inhabitation, knowledge, and solidarity. Together, these projects reveal that stress is a condition that moves intrinsically through architecture’s materiality, labour structures, and infrastructures, and suggest that stress is a condition that can be negotiated, redirected, and sometimes transformed into more supportive ways of living and working together. 

V69 looks at stress not so solemnly all the time. While flipping through the pages of the magazine, you will find mandalas to color and unwind, a crossword, a collection of objects for stress management, and scattered quotes from architects about the everyday anxieties they encounter in their design practice, interruptions that create buffer zones that provide some form of relief. All of this in close collaboration with our new graphic design by Miquel Hervás Gómes. 

It’s easy to find stress around us all, specifically at this moment, to manage it is something different. We hope this guide helps you navigate and manage stressful times. 

Cover image by Marina Otero Verzier from her article “Floating in Lithium” in VOLUME69: Stress Management. Original image has been filtered by ColorLibrary.ch

VOLUME69: Stress Management is now available in our webshop and at NAi Booksellers, among other places.