LONDON.- This November, the Museum of Architecture is launching Well Built: Designing for Health and Wellbeing in Architecture. The exhibition traces new ways of thinking about health and wellbeing beyond the design of traditional therapeutic environments towards a more integrated approach that includes everyday spaces. The exhibition is divided into five different sections, each of which examines a specific building typology – hospitals and health centres, housing, workplaces, schools and public spaces. Demonstrating the enduring historical relationship between health and the city, Well Built points to the urgent need in reshaping our assumptions about health, place and space.

Today, as in the past, architects, urban designers, landscape architects and designers have the ability to actively influence our health and wellbeing, with our homes, workspaces and urban areas increasingly being designed to allow us to make better lifestyle choices. Well Built takes this knowledge further by showcasing the growing connections between the traditional public health domain and the built environment.

The exhibition starts from hospitals as historic health spaces and continues to workplace, education, housing and public space. Projects included in the exhibition range from floating lidos to pop-up cultural centres for the elderly, alternative healthcare spaces such as Maggie’s Centres to new co-housing schemes. Architects involved include prominent UK-based practices such as Studio Octopi, The Decorators, Buckley Gray Yeoman, Architecture PLB, Arup, 4M Group and many more.

Rather than simply showing the final projects, Well Built places particular importance on how the buildings provide better health and wellbeing for the people and communities who occupy them.

By sharing the current questions that the industry is asking, discussions with experts and researchers or interviews with inhabitants of these spaces, Well Built provides an overview of knowledge and information on designing for health and wellbeing that both architects and the public can build on.

Well Built: Designing for Health and Wellbeing in Architecture is the result of an ongoing research project initiated by Museum of Architecture in Autumn 2015. The project ran as a year-long programme of events, talks, debates and panel discussions centred around broader ideas, such as building healthy communities, designing for public health or rethinking the way we live. The findings of the programme formed the foundation of the exhibition that recognises the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to contemporary health-related architecture, involving not just architects but clients, developers, academics, communities and end users.

The exhibition is sponsored by Saint-Gobain (Jewson and Ecophon) and 4M Group. Museum of Architecture is a proud partner of Brompton Design District.