Imperfect Health

Imperfect Health explores how today’s urban environment challenges city residents, who are experiencing a measurable increase in new health concerns. It is now believed that factors like pollution, pollen and food production, combined with new lifestyle issues such as decreasing physical activity and rising stress levels are behind a boom in once rare complications including allergies, asthma and obesity. In recent years, such health concerns have encouraged a rethinking of urban strategies and architectural approaches, in hopes of countering such ominous health trends. The exhibition seeks an understanding of the contemporary relationship between architecture, the city and people’s health. As health becomes a central focus of political debate, Imperfect Health raises questions: whether architects, urban designers and landscape architects are seeking to craft a new moral and political agenda out of such concerns; whether health issues are becoming a new raison d'être, a way to justify and apply corrective measures like increasing pedestrian access, devising alternative traffic strategies, using stairs to fight obesity, and rehabilitating polluted areas as a way to reduce rates of asthma, allergies or cancer; whether new architectural types are mirroring the specialized needs of medicine as real solutions for complex health issues, often rooted in socioeconomic and work-related stressors; and finally if such solutions are motivated by real medical necessity? The exhibition is the latest in a series of thematic investigations produced by the CCA that has included: the award-winning Sense of the City; Actions; 1973: Sorry Out of Gas; Some Ideas on Living in London and Toyko by Stephen Taylor and Ryue Nishizawa; Speed Limits; Other Space Odysseys and Journeys. http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/exhibitions