Volume 69 tackles stress in architecture
Archis and the Nieuwe Instituut present Volume 69: Stress Management. 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 tackles the tension head-on. The new issue brings together twenty contributors to examine how architecture absorbs, produces, and sometimes transforms stress. Copies are now available in the magazine's webshop and at NAi Booksellers, among other places.
23 June 2026
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
Volume 69: Stress Management examines 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, Volume looks 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.
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 Costas, Stephan, Geoffrey Timmer and Marco Vanucci. This will be the first issue of Volume materialised by Miquel Hervás Gómez. Stephan Petermann is the magazine’s editor in chief, María Mazzanti is its managing editor.
Read the magazine digitally or on paper
The magazine is available in the Volume webshop (both digital and hard copy) and at NAi Booksellers. Subscribers to Volume receive all issues at home. Volume is also available at a range of bookstores worldwide, coordinated by distributor IDEA Books. Booksellers interested in including Volume in their offerings can contact the Archis at info@archis.org.
About Volume
Volume is a bi-annual magazine for architecture and design and is a collaboration between Archis and Nieuwe Instituut. The magazine is a cross-pollinator between the in-depth editorial content of Volume and the research and programmes of the Nieuwe Instituut, while maintaining its editorial independence.
