The Wellcome Collection show on architecture and health is a real tonic, finds Vanessa Norwood

Words
Vanessa Norwood

‘Living with Buildings’ is at the Wellcome Collection, London NW1, until 3 March 2019, details: wellcomecollection.org

The word ‘wellbeing’ is becoming ubiquitous; a vague concept as helpful as last year’s buzzword, ‘hygge’. ‘Living with Buildings’, the Wellcome Collection’s major new exhibition curated by Emily Sargent, arrives then at a timely moment to focus on the connections between health and architecture, a subject that has concerned architects, writers, doctors and the inhabitants of our cities since the formation of nineteenth-century slums, where the exhibition’s story begins.

Pepys Estate, Deptford, London (ph: Tony Ray Jones/RIBA Collection); above: ‘Your Britain – Fight for it Now’ features Lubetkin and Tecton’s Finsbury Health Centre set against run-down housing (1942, by Abram Games, ph: Wellcome Collection)

There’s a rich variety of material on display including maps, paintings, posters, models, films and books, including Charles Dickens’ 1850 draft preface to ‘Oliver Twist’. In response to one Peter Laurie, a magistrate who had dismissed Dickens’ portrayal of Bermondsey slum Jacob’s Island as fictional, the author declared that “nothing effectual can be done for the elevation of the poor in England, until their dwelling places are made decent and wholesome”. Jacob’s Island disappeared a century ago; drained and filled, it became the site of warehouses and our modern-day iteration, luxury flats.

The exhibition is full of decent, wholesome ambitions, and to see them is to be reminded that lessons are learnt, but sometimes forgotten. The 1961 Parker Morris report on the quality of social housing, ‘Homes for Today and Tomorrow’, resulted in minimum space requirements for residents, mandatory in public housing until 1980 when the incoming Conservative government shifted focus to a reduction in public spending. New builds in the UK currently offer the smallest living spaces in Europe.

Paris Montparnasse 1993 by photographer Andreas Gursky (ph: Tate, London 2018)

Alvar Aalto’s meticulously designed Paimo Sanatorium in Finland (1933) is here, with its custom-designed armchair on a plinth, spot-lit and every inch the icon. The main purpose of the building was “to function as a medical instrument”, said Aalto. The sanatorium sits in contrast to its contemporaneous massive dolls house of a model made in the pre-NHS 1930s to demonstrate the ‘modern hospital’. Early-twentieth-century concerns with light, ventilation and open space are visible in the familiar Finsbury Health Centre and Peckham’s Pioneer Health Centre, the latter seen in a fascinating if rather disturbing 1948 film showing users of the ‘family club’ studied lab-rat style by social biologists. The best of our contemporary approach to healthcare is represented by the Maggie’s Centres. The charity’s co-founder, Charles Jencks, describes Norman Foster’s Manchester centre (2013) as reminiscent of “outstretched arms… a good symbol of our collective cancer approach”.

Grenfell is referenced with the unflinching inclusion of the residents’ association’s chillingly prescient, heartbreaking website post of November 2016 stating: “The Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord… and bring to an end the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that they inflict upon their tenants”.

Works by artists and film-makers Catherine Yass, Steffi Klenz and Ilona Sagar add a contemporary energy to the exhibition. Rab Harling’s 2014 film ‘Inversion/Reflection’ gives voice to former council tenants of the Balfron Tower charting its controversial transition from public housing to private ownership. Spoken word adds to an auditory landscape of soundtracks including the plaintive male voice from Martha Rosler’s 1993 film ‘How Do We Know What Home Looks Like?’ (which examines Corb’s Unité at Firminy) and the gallery hums with sound, as if the visitor has arrived mid-conversation. Colour too plays an important role in the show. Artist Giles Round was commissioned to respond to the exhibition’s calm and clever design by Smout Allen, with the fabric of the show providing surfaces for Round’s palette devised from the artist’s research. There are moments of joy but at times the colours are more onslaught than salve.

The Wellcome’s first-floor gallery houses the winning submission to an open call asking for provocations on the ability of architecture to respond to a contemporary global health issue. Doctors of the World joined forces with Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, Buro Happold and Chapman BDSP to produce a CNC-cut plywood mobile clinic that is designed to be flexible, strong and easily transportable. At the end of ‘Living with Buildings’, it will begin a new life in the field – a fitting outcome for an ambitious, expansive and hugely enjoyable exhibition.

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