From the series: ‘Patterns of Spatial Ecstasy’
Touch points. Healing may be a personal endeavor, but the healing process is similar for most people. It involves finding safety, being mindful, confronting difficult memories, and rebuilding social connections.12
Art and architecture have longstanding histories of guiding cultural growth, and challenging the way people relate to themselves and their environments. Projects in these fields can cultivate a sense of security, allow space for reflection, and strengthen social connections. Their ability to do these things represent touch points between art, architecture, and the healing process.
Below, these touch points are described in more detail, and illustrated with precedent projects. They represent a framework of parameters for understanding, evaluating, and developing resilience training spaces.
Home Bases. Intuitively, people feel safe when their environments are non-threatening. They tend to relax around smooth, organic forms without corners, while looking at natural landscapes, or when cocooned in warmth and softness, such as in a hammock or in water. 345 ‘Home Bases’ are safe, soothing spaces that celebrate a connection with nature. They are characterized by their non-threatening forms, soft textures, and gentle colors.
While the artists and architects who developed the following projects didn’t necessarily create these works as ‘home bases’, they illustrate some of the ways in which space can be soothing and nourishing.
‘Particular Matter(s)’ (Saracano, 2022) was an immersive art installation inside The Shed, a 39 foot diameter exhibition space in New York City. Two wire mesh nets were suspended across the space, spanning the full diameter of the exhibition hall. These nets represented spider webs, on which visitors would lay, while they felt and heard a concert of vibrations made by other visitors traversing the net.
The Weather Project (Eliasson, 2003) was an installation of mixed atmospheric medium in the great atrium of TATE Modern that recreated the familiar experience of ‘going to the beach’. A giant orange sun appeared to be suspended above the main gallery, filling the space with heat and causing visitors to lay out blankets, play games, read, and relax.
The MIT Chapel (Saarinen, 1955) establishes a sense of safety through its program and form. Light plays off undulating brick walls at the building’s interior, bouncing up from a moat around its perimeter. With only a few dozen seats, the space is intimate. An installation of golden flakes catches light from a skylight above and appears to suspend time.
To contrast Home Bases, which soothe and comfort their occupants, our next touchpoint, Here Now spaces, do not aim to soothe and comfort. In fact, they are more often uncomfortable, because they draw attention to the feeling of the body in space.
Here Now. Mindfulness can lead to reduced depression and anxiety – causing others to perceive you as healthy, happy and charismatic.9 ‘Here Now’ environments promote mindfulness by challenging occupants to reflect on somatic sensation – this may be through movement, temperature, or other means.
Labyrinths, for instance, have been increasingly used to respond to mental health challenges because of their ability to inspire meditative states. They have been installed in prisons for therapeutic use by inmates, such as at the Massachusetts County Jail.10 At a walkable scale, the body moves through space and repeatedly encounters frustration before eventually overcoming the physical and mental challenge of navigating a maze.
Life on the Oblique (Parent and Virillio, 1964) is a theoretical exploration of how architecture might engage the mind and body through physical challenges such as walking up and down hills. Their theory was that engaging the body by activating the ground plane would prevent people from getting lost in their thoughts.
Reversible Destiny Lofts (Arakawa and Gins, 2005) were designed to keep occupants young by challenging them. Eccentric forms continuously forced occupants to redefine their relationship with space. This project was based on psychological studies which suggest that overcoming challenges results in brain development, and fends off the deterioration of grey matter.
While Here Now spaces evoke physical movement or sensation, the next touchpoint is far less inherently physical and far more innately emotional. They are more catered to developing and reinforcing narratives than they are to the physical body.
Storytelling Spaces. Spiritual stories teach moral lessons about compassion, looking past differences, and facing unpleasant realities. Heroic tales teach lessons of persistence, perseverance and resilience. The stories you tell yourself influence what you believe is possible. When people face their fears, they can learn that they have the ability to overcome them.13
‘Storytelling Spaces’ tell stories – whether by revisiting personal narratives that were formed through experience, or by connecting to a place through its history, culture, or mythology. Sometimes the act of storytelling is also the act of creating a space, and sometimes stories unfold as some video games do – where navigating through a space helps to build an understanding of it.
The projects below are evocative of feelings or challenges that either have been or continue to be overcome. They build empathy between a space and it’s history. This type of space presents narratives of strength by providing examples of overcoming challenges.
Soft Sculptures (Kusama, 1962) consisted of armchairs, infinity rooms, and paintings made from stuffed phalluses. In that era, the New York art world was male dominated and machismo. Kusama started making them to help her heal her disgust towards sex, and she has said that hand sewing hundreds of phalluses helped her concur that fear.
La Escuela Mecánica de la Armada (2015) was a site of atrocity in Argentina, and has since been converted into a museum and memorial. Video, plaques, and holographic projections augment the existing, untouched site. This allows for the physical space to remain, while installations inform visitors about the meaning and implications of the marks that surround them.
“Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in LA) (Félix González-Torres, 1991) is considered to be an allegorical portrait of the artist’s long term partner, who died of AIDS related complications. It consists of a continuously replenishing 175 pound pile of candy stacked in the corner of a room, corresponding to the weight of the artist’s partner. Gallery goers were invited to eat candy from the pile.
Where Storytelling spaces may be more focused on reckoning with and overcoming past events, Stage Sets, our next touchpoint, takes a different approach that is more aspirational and perhaps even utopian. These spaces are essentially practice rooms for overcoming challenges that help to build courage and optimism towards facing similar challenges in daily life.
Stage Sets. In some books and movies, there is a trope in which a room materializes when a character needs a place to practice new behaviors. It is called ‘the room of requirement’, and seems to anticipate the needs of its occupants, providing the proper equipment to help them attain their goals. ‘Stage sets’ are similar to rooms of requirement in that they are immersive, interactive simulations that can be used to practice understanding and overcoming challenges in a safe space.
New Babylon (Nieuwenhuys, 1959-74) was a utopian architecture that imagined a collectively owned land in which labor was fully automated. The structures laid the groundwork for a homo-luden community governed by creative play. The project was realized through a series of models that are now held in Delft.
Forest of Us (Devlin, 2021) is an immersive and sensorial commentary on the relationship between media and the larger biosphere. Devlin’s work often tells stories that unfold with the performances that take place within them. Her projects combine light, music, language, and visual imagery. Forest of Us challenges viewers to become actively involved in the outcome of events.
Sanatorium (Reyes, 2011) was a short term art exhibition simulating a clinic. Workshops held in ‘hospital’ rooms were designed as procedures to cure ailments. It was clear to exhibition goers that they were in an interactive art exhibition, not an actual medical environment, but many still self-reported feeling better after participating.
Gris (Nomada Studio, 2019) is a platform-adventure video game in which the player protagonist learns how to flourish again after a tragic loss. She does so by undertaking a number of challenges and solving puzzles that correspond with the stages of grief.
The final touchpoint is ‘Community Building Spaces’. This is perhaps the most unique, in that – as a typology – spaces that strive to ‘build community’ so rarely are successful in doing so. Many projects over the years have tried to build community through various means and failed.
Where all of the other examples and categories discussed so far tap into personal and innate human nature – the desire to feel safe, the importance of relieving tension in the body, the instinct and importance of telling stories and practicing courage – Community building spaces are very locationally specific, since they are much more reliant on how people relate to each other.
Community Building Spaces. It can be difficult to predict what will soothe or aggravate existing tensions between community members, even with the best intentions.21 A space that works well to connect people in one culture or geographic region, may fall flat in another.
Generally, projects that connect people on the basis of their commonalities are more successful.22 As such, ‘Community Building Spaces’ generally connect people on the basis of similar interests, values, or beliefs.
The House of One (2012) is a multi faith project in Berlin that unites three monotheistic religions under one roof. A synagogue, church, and mosque circle a central common area that is accessible from all three secular places of worship. While unfinished, the goal of the project is to provide a forum for discovering commonalities, while maintaining differences in spatial needs related to distinct religious practices.
The Homeless Vehicle Project (Wodiczko, 1987-89) connected people despite differences while also scandalizing homelessness in New York City. Artist Krzysztof Wodiczko worked with homeless collaborators to design vehicles that could assist them in their daily activities, but the true purpose of these machines was to provide a platform to start conversations with people who are typically unseen and unheard.
Summary. You’ll notice there are overlaps between some of these categories, and that not all precedent projects fit cleanly into one bucket. Hopefully, they are illustrative enough of the intent for each category, that they serve to clarify it.
These touch points are a helpful framework for thinking about resilience training spaces – they provide a place to start that is founded in the healing and growing process.
As discussed in earlier posts, the healing process is inherently somatic25, so spatial mediums like art and architecture are well situated to learn from it, integrate its principles, and test their capacity to achieve a similar effect.
Where the examples above represent projects that loosely align with the framework described in each category, I thought it might be useful to illustrate how these categories can be used to help in the concept generation process for developing spaces that are explicitly designed to help train resilience.
Example. Below is an example project that explores a project concept that would fit within the framework of a ‘stage set’.
The Golden Rule Room
The ‘Golden Rule Room’ is designed to support the principle of treating others as you would want to be treated by them.
I use generative AI to test resilience training room concepts quickly, because it provides speedy and iterative graphic feedback. The first set of images below, were generated with DALL-E, using prompts with increasing specificity. The initial prompt was: ‘actions taken in one space influence the experience of an adjacent space.’
Once I came to the image on the far right, it inspired further development through hand sketching. See the below floor plan diagram that resulted from this process.
The design consists of two adjacent hallways that lead to one chamber. One person enters each hall at the same time, but in order to move towards the final chamber, they must slide walls out of their path that block their way. As they do, these sliding walls block the path of their counterpart in the adjacent hallway. The final shared chamber provides a space for both participants to reflect on their experience before moving back through the halls toward the exit.
After developing these hand sketches further, I then uploaded them into Stable Diffusion, a relatively new open source image generation tool. A plug in for this tool, Control Nets, allows you to Style Transfer – quickly animating a sketch into a style of my choosing – in order to provide color to the concept.
The prompt I used to guide this was process was: ‘A well lit axonometric view, showing a ghosted interior and highly reflective walls. A cheerful palette of blues, greens, creams, and oranges‘.
This space, the ‘Golden Rule Room’, serves to physically illustrate the Golden Rule. After traveling through the room in one direction, and likely both hindering and being hindered by their counterpart in the other hall, visitors enter the same chamber. At this point they face the person who has been putting obstacles in their path and reckon with the fact that they have been similarly culpable in putting obstacles in theirs.
In this final chamber, they can turn around together and see down both adjacent halls – the one through which they came, and the other through which their counterpart came. Chairs in this chamber allow for the participants to sit, talk, and reflect on their experience together before retracing their steps to the exit.