Ebook: Living with buildings: health and architecture

Buildings shape our lives and our health. They affect how we sleep, work, socialise and even breathe. They can isolate us, make us sick or put us in danger, but they can also heal. We, in turn, make our buildings an extension of ourselves: our hopes, fears and vanities. The structures we choose to inhabit absorb our histories and leave traces for future generations to read.

In Living With Buildings Iain Sinclair embarks on a series of journeys - through London, Marseilles, the Outer Hebrides and Sweden - to explore the conflicted relationship between sickness and structure. He investigates the connection between art, architecture, social planning and health, and considers the notion that we refine our own pathologies until we locate the buildings in which to place them.

A father and his daughter, who suffers from a rare syndrome, return to the estate where they once lived. A whalebone box, a fetish made for contemplation of mortality, is carried back to the...