Introduction

Architecture is hard stuff. It is formed by walls, roofs, floors, all components of hard materials, stone, glass and wood. It distributes people in space and directs their doings and movements. Institutions are even harder stuff. Order is pushed a step further by the coerciveness of discursive architectural models and caring practices, restricting options to certain ways of thinking and acting. This book illuminates how people and spaces negotiate, and often challenge, regularities and patterns embedded in the meeting between architecture and institutions. It contains a number of essays by authors from disciplines such as human geography, architecture, planning, design, social work and education. The contributions discuss different examples from institutions in which care is carried out, such as assisted living facilities, residential care for children, psychiatric care facilities, hospitals, and prisons. By adopting a non-representational perspective, emergent practices render visible capacities of being flexible and mouldable, in which institutional architecture is defied, contested and transformed. New situations appear which transgress physical space in partnership with those who populate it, whether humans or non-humans. This book reveals the relational and transformative conditions of care architecture and the ways in which institutions transform (or not) into caring architecture.