Journal of Architectural Education Call for Papers: HEALTH

Architecture has, for centuries, been understood to foster individual health, public health, physical health, and mental health. And yet, in the face of major public health crises, architecture is implicated in complications that it alone cannot solve. Businesses, governments, schools, and others have responded to COVID-19 with a mix of individual, social, technological, and design strategies such as temporary barriers between people, physical distancing, and improved building ventilation. And yet, these interventions cannot address the fact that the virus’s impact falls unevenly along stark economic and demographic lines, and urban and rural divides. Further, Black Lives Matter has gained global traction and exposed state violence against people of color as a major public health issue, catalyzing public spaces and streets as sites of action and protest. Architecture and the built environment are newly understood as instigators, agents, and mediators of power dynamics that have as much potential to contribute to health crises as to remedy them, and scholars and practitioners are critically reconsidering what constitutes both individual and public health.
 
This issue of JAE aims to assemble a collection of research, design projections, ideas, and opinions that interpret anew the contemporary and the historical relation between health and architecture. From the scale of buildings to interiors, from landscapes to urbanism, and from individual to public spaces, what do architects, landscape architects, urban designers, architectural historians, and architectural theorists make of architecture’s current or past relationship to health? Contributions to the category of Scholarship of Design and Micro-Narrative might reveal and contextualize different historical and contemporary turns toward health through examinations of buildings, materials, architects, practices, infrastructures, and larger systems from immigration to economics to climate change. Contributions to the category of Design as Scholarship might interrogate the question of designing architecture for health: what kinds of social, technological, or political agendas can designers enact in a world increasingly anxious about health, without assuming health to be a binary condition of “well” or “unwell,” or resorting to ableism? And in an increasingly global, digital, and neoliberal landscape, how will access to these spaces be facilitated? How does public infrastructure facilitate public health? How will architects re-imagine individual and collective spaces of health and well-being, and the palliative landscapes that contribute to these? How will architects create spaces of patient-hood? What once-alternative approaches to daily life will become the norm? How can designers balance the merits of increased digital surveillance and control with the threats to society and privacy? What habits, outcomes, and practices are beyond control? How does design address newly reimagined forms of democracy, of citizenship? These questions, and many others, are at the heart of this issue.
 
The submission deadline for all manuscripts for this theme issue is July 30, 2021, 5 pm US Eastern Time Zone. Accepted articles will be published in issue 76:1 (March 2022). For author instructions please consult: https://www.jaeonline.org/pages/submit.

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