'Materialities of care' is outlined as a heuristic device for making visible the mundane and often unnoticed aspects of material culture within health and social care contexts, and exploring interrelations between materials and care in practice. Three analytic strands inherent to the concept are delineated: spatialities of care, temporalities of care and practices of care. These interconnecting themes span the articles in this special issue. The articles explore material practice across a range of clinical and non-clinical spaces, including hospitals, hospices, care homes, museums, domestic spaces, and community spaces such as shops and tenement stairwells. The collection addresses fleeting moments of care, as well as choreographed routines that order bodies and materials. Throughout there is a focus on practice, and relations between materials and care as ongoing, emergent and processual. We conclude by reflecting on methodological approaches for examining 'materialities of care', and offer some thoughts as to how this analytic approach might be applied to future research within the sociology of health and illness.

Sociologists of health and illness have tended to overlook health care architecture and buildings. This contrasts with medical geographers who have yielded a body of work on the significance of places and spaces in the experience of health and illness. A review of those sociological studies that have studied the role of the built environment in the performance of medical practice uncovers an important vein of work, worthy of further study. Through the historically situated example of hospital architecture, this article seeks to tease out substantive and methodological issues that can inform a distinctive sociology of health care architecture. Contemporary health care buildings manifest design models developed for hotels, shopping malls and homes. These design features are congruent with neo-liberal forms of subjectivity in which patients are constituted as consumers and responsibilised citizens. We conclude that an adequate sociology of health care architecture necessitates an appreciation of both the construction and experience of buildings, exploring the briefs and plans of their designers, and observing their everyday uses. Combining approaches and methods from the sociology of health and illness and science and technology studies offers potential for a novel research agenda that takes health care buildings as its substantive focus.

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This article draws on ethnographic data from a UK Economic and Social ResearchCouncil (ESRC) funded study called 'Buildings in the Making'. The project aims to open up the black box of architectural work to explore what happens between the commissioning of architectural projects through to the construction of buildings, and seeks to understand how ideas about care for later life are operationalised into designs. Drawing on recent scholarship on 'materialities of care' and 'practising architectures', which emphasise the salience of material objects for understanding the politics and practices of care, we focus here on 'beds'. References to 'beds' were ubiquitous throughout our data, and we analyse their varied uses and imaginaries as a 'way in' to understanding the embedded nature of architectural work. Four themes emerged: 'commissioning architectures and the commodification of beds'; 'adjusting architectures and socio-spatial inequalities of beds'; 'prescribing architectures and person-centred care beds'; and 'phenomenological architectures and inhabiting beds'. We offer the concept prescribed personalisation to capture how practising architectures come to reconcile the multiple tensions of commodification and the codification of person centred care, in ways that might mitigate phenomenological and serendipitous qualities of life and living in care settings during later life.

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