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Vital health check on global architecture from Iain Sinclair
Quality assurance: Interior Le Corbusier building, Marseille [Michel Georges-Bernard/Creative Commons]

Living with Buildings and Walking with Ghosts: On Health and Architecture
by Iain Sinclair
(Profile Books, £14.99)

IN LIVING with Buildings, Iain Sinclair’s deceptively uncomplicated storytelling conceals an erudite situationist sensibility, with the narratives subtly subverting habitual perceptions and challenging intellectual complacency.

He embarks on a series of expeditions — through London, Marseille, Mexico and the Outer Hebrides — seeking out the relationship between sickness and structure, social planning and health and encounters between distinct cultures.

His findings are, according to Robert Macfarlane,  “at once disorientating and illuminating” and  disorientating they certainly are. But the effort required to connect the Sinclair dots is inevitably liberating.

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