What does it mean to manage stress, and what happens when the very discipline meant to relieve it becomes a source of pressure itself? VOLUME 69: Stress Management tackles the tension head-on. The new issue brings together twenty contributors to examine how architecture absorbs, produces, and sometimes transforms stress. Get your copy via VOLUME’s webshop.

An issue about architecture’s most fundamental task

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.

How architecture understands, absorbs, adapts to, or relieves stress

For VOLUME 69: 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 relational 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.

Solemn and light contributions

In VOLUME 69, 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. Yet, you will also 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.

Contributors to VOLUME 69

The contributors to VOLUME 69 are: Lara Almacergui, Paris Bezaitis and Galena Sardamova, Rosi Braidotti, Ania Molenda and Francien van Westrenen, Celine Condorelli, Stefano Dealessandri, Pietro Fabris, Serena De Mola, Lorenzo Rapisarda and Piergiorgio Boscaro, Jack Farman, Tio Gabunia, Olaf Grawert and Stephan Petermann, Michelle Gulickx, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, The Architecture Lobby, Manuel Orazi, Marina Otero, Nuria Ribas Costa, Stephan, Geoffrey Timmer and Marco Vanucci. This will be the first issue of VOLUME materialized by Miquel Hervás Gómez. Stephan Petermann is VOLUME’s editor in chief, María Mazzanti is its managing editor.