BE – The Journal of The Built Environment Trust. Issue 2 ‘Wellbeing’, 148 pages, £15
PRESS RELEASE
“Anyone with a taste for traditional architecture must agree that the Japanese toilet is perfection, ” writes Jun’ichiro Tanazaki in an extract from In Praise of Shadows in the new issue of BE. The second issue of BE – The Journal of The Built Environment Trust takes readers on a walk across the landscape of ‘Wellbeing’ from the aesthetic and physiological delights of the Japanese toilet, to essential texts on ‘Biophilia’ by Judith Heerwagen, and the late Oliver Sacks on the ‘Restorative Commons’, to Sarah Williams Goldhagen examining the relationship between architecture and neuroscience in Louis Kahn’s design of the Salk Institute of Biological Studies in Lo Jolla, California.
In our economically and politically stressful times, the notion of wellbeing has struck a nerve among consumers and businesses, the current issue of BE explores how wellbeing is played out by architects and designers in the built environment, examining its wider social and political context. In our feature ‘Beyond the Panopticon’, architect Mads Mandrup and landscaper designer Marianne Levinson reveal the design decisions behind Denmark’s Storstrøm Prison, called the world’s ‘most humane’ maximum security prison, and reflect on the political and philosophical issues they wrestled with as designers.
