"These Architecture Students Explore the Healing Power of Water: Design projects centered on water promote wellness, celebrate infrastructure, and reconnect communities with their environment," Metropolis, Jun. 6, 2015.
Five projects from this year’s METROPOLIS Future100 winners recognize water’s essential role in life, integrating the element into libraries, community centers, wellness retreats, and structures that showcase its impact.
Several students centered their projects on water’s restorative qualities. Marianna Godfrey’s proposal for a wellness retreat at Sweetwater Creek State Park outside of Atlanta, Georgia, attempts to repair the legacies of Cherokee expulsion and slavery by using the ruins of a brick manufacturing plant and cotton mill that used forced labor to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The University of Michigan M. Arch student’s idea is to extend the intervention above a natural stream while providing views and access to the water. The wellness retreat frames the encounters with the natural world as opportunities for meditation for individual and group therapy. “There are significant studies that indicate that any kind of landscape, nature, and water is very helpful for healing, particularly for PTSD treatment,” says Godfrey.
Likewise, University of Texas interior design master’s student Winnie Lin revitalizes a senior living facility in Austin, incorporating a spa retreat, lap pools, jacuzzi, and children’s pool into the structure to help treat arthritis and enhance community access. “Pools are a heavy part of Austin life, and in that area, there was not an accessible pool to the public,” Lin says. “With a diagnosis of arthritis, not only does a pool make sense for seniors, but as a site context, it also fits with the rest of the community at large.”
