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.

It’s never his intention to offer tablets-of-stone certainties. In Mexico, he meets artist Manuel Ramirez Martinez and finds that he has “no valid method of articulating ... the burden of [cultural] contradictions,” so they sat in Martinez’s yard and drank while “time yawned,” nevertheless finding “an amiable balance.”

In Marseille, when a fire breaks in a unit of le Corbusier’s Unite d’habitation — where his friend Jonathan Meades lives — the fire is constrained because of the high quality of its construction and nobody perishes. But the Grenfell tower, built 20 years later, becomes a “crematorium” revealing “municipal short-termism, verging on criminality.”

Knowledge should protect like “defensive magic” against harm from buildings that will be used to conspire against ordinary people once their vulnerability and defencelessness become known, Sinclair asserts. An example is south-east London's Pepys estate, flogged by Lewisham to Berkeley Homes for £10 million, whose executives “clinked champagne glasses as residents were ‘decanted’ from their homes.”

The disquietingly potent charcoal drawing of Christ Church in Spitalfields by Leon Kossoff sets the tone for the book, with the urgency of his beguiling graphic annotation an antidote of beauty against the depredations of developers circling it like vultures.

It typifies a work which provides an eloquent and compelling inoculation against the addictive spiritual austerity of instant gratification and the fake bliss of thoughtlessness.