Architecture is built on pressure. It resists gravity and structures how we live and work, but it also produces stress through extraction, overproduction, and exhaustive practices around materials, landscapes, and bodies. What does it mean to manage stress? What happens when the very discipline meant to relieve it becomes a source of pressure itself? This issue tackles the tension head-on. Through contributions from 20 experts and thinkers in the field, it traces and examines how architecture absorbs, displaces, manages, and transforms stress, while pointing towards practices of care, collaboration, and repair that put forward other ways of living and working under pressure.

Architecture is built on pressure. It resists gravity and structures how we live and work, but it also produces stress through extraction, overproduction, and exhaustive practices around materials, landscapes, and bodies. What does it mean to manage stress? What happens when the very discipline meant to relieve it becomes a source of pressure itself? This issue tackles the tension head-on. Through contributions from 20 experts and thinkers in the field, it traces and examines how architecture absorbs, displaces, manages, and transforms stress, while pointing towards practices of care, collaboration, and repair that put forward other ways of living and working under pressure.