PHOTOGRAPHY: © Matt Staver

Mothership, a shelter for previously homeless youth in Denver, has a skylit common room and outdoor terraces.

PHOTOGRAPHY: © Matt Staver

Art, quality materials, and well lit, welcoming spaces are examples of what Holtz­inger calls “visual cues of worth.” As at Boys Town, such cues play a significant role in Shopworks’ design for the Mothership, a 66,600-square-foot, four-story shelter for up to 135 previously homeless children and young people. Features such as a bright, comforting lobby, a skylit common room with a choice of alcoves or central space, of tables or lounge seating; dignified materials including wood, concrete, and ceramics; good ventilation and acoustics to avoid sensory overload; and amenities such as a music studio, art room, and outdoor terraces all contribute to a place that tells residents they’re valued. “Kids don’t choose to be homeless. They happen to be homeless,” Holtzinger says. “We want to destigmatize that.”

Tripling the capacity of the site’s previous, dormitory-style building (dark and smelling of mildew and socks, as Holtzinger describes it), the Mothership represents a significant innovation in the typology of shelter. Unlike existing models in Denver’s youth system—“We’ve got 20 years of data that says the outcomes aren’t great,” Holtzinger says—the building is configured into seven co-housing-like “neighborhoods.” Each one accommodates 12 to 18 residents and consists of a shared kitchen, living/dining room, bathing facilities, and double rooms with beds, desks, and a sofa. The use of transparency and attention to sight lines allow for previewing one space from another, a design that minimizes dead ends, and a choice of routes to further reduce anxiety.

The neighborhoods are intended as transitional housing that supports residents until they feel ready to move out on their own (or reach the maximum age). They are places where residents can build self-worth, practical skills like cooking, doing laundry, paying rent on time, and maintaining a credit score, and a social network that could continue to support them after they leave. “We’re trying to set kids up to experience life in a salutogenic, life-affirming way,” Holtzinger says. Even in the building’s emergency dormitory, to which new arrivals are admitted before moving to a neighborhood, each bed has a phone shelf, lamp, coat hook, and locker, details meant to offer occupants a sense of personal space and control over their environment right from the start.

The Mothership is the result of years of pre-design effort, with Shopworks supporting its nonprofit client, Urban Peak, in grappling with questions from unfamiliar perspectives, such as those involving real estate, finance, zoning, building code, and trauma-informed design, that ultimately led to the neighborhood paradigm. “Architects play an outsized role in developing projects like this,” Holtzinger says. “Our role was more of being a partner in figuring out what the project needed to be.”

When people are treated with dignity, their stress—evidenced by heart-rate variability and cortisol levels—drops. Architec­ture’s ability to contribute to this through design for dignity is especially relevant in therapeutic environments such as the Ohana Center for Child and Adolescent Behavioral Health. “The building itself becomes an element of our prevention program,” Ohana’s physician in chief and medical director, Susan Swick, has said. “It creates a sense of possibility and hope.”

PHOTOGRAPHY: © Ty Cole/OTTO

Ohana’s design incorporates curves at multiple scales, including that of a hallway.

PHOTOGRAPHY: © Ty Cole/OTTO

The gym was placed at the center of Ohana to take advantage of the benefits of movement on mental health.

The 55,600-square-foot mental health facility comprises an outpatient-treatment wing, inpatient rooms, classrooms, a variety of therapeutic spaces, and places for informal gathering, all designed to ensure occupants’ sense of comfort, choice, and control over their circumstances. Supported by research suggesting that soft lines are more soothing than sharp angles, the design incorporates gentle curves at multiple levels of scale, from a winding plan to filleted millwork corners. The proven benefits of movement on mental health informed the decision to position the gymnasium prominently, at the center of the facility. The building also incorporates transparency for previewing what’s ahead, art to enrich and engage, and materials that convey dignity and worth (Ohana is one of the country’s largest health-care buildings to use mass timber, for example).

Throughout the design process, a primary goal was to maximize occupants’ connections to the landscape, “so that nature can become part of the healing process,” says Jonathan Ward, a partner at NBBJ. With a hillside site that looks out over Coastal live oak–studded hills, openings—from glazed walls to window nooks—provide panoramic or focused views from every part of the facility. Outside, the curves of the building define three enclosures designed around stands of oak. Stepping down the site from more public to more private zones, the upper courtyard is associated with the outpatient area, the central one with the dining room and gym, and the lower with the inpatient rooms. And because working with troubled children and youth can be stressful for front-line staff—with turnover at such facilities typically as high as 40 percent a year—staff break spaces are designed to provide refreshment and help reduce burnout, with outdoor terraces and splendid views.

Additional strategies for a salutogenic building include the installation of certain fragrant plants throughout the facility, particularly ones that release pinenes, compounds which have been shown to boost immune function. Outside, a fruit and vegetable garden provides enjoyable and productive tasks that can help children to recover their sense of personal agency. “What we’ve done is create a model for how architecture and design is part of the healing environment,” Ward says. “Beyond technology and efficiency, it’s about the human experience. It’s about understanding how humans are best adapted to their environment to be productive, healthy, and happy.”

As at Ohana, connection to nature is a vital aspect of trauma-informed design at the expanded facilities of Parrott Creek Child and Family Services, an 80-acre retreat that provides restorative programming for traumatized teens. Inspired by a vernacular farmhouse on the site, the project takes for its parti the concept of the porch: a safe, sheltered, transitional space that offers users the option to connect with others or find solitude in relationship with the landscape. “The porch concept resonates across cultures,” says Eli­sandra Garcia, director of engagement at El Dorado. “It provides an intimate place for a difficult conversation or a moment of decompression during a hard day, but also a warm place where we welcome loved ones.” The design interprets the porch in various versions throughout the compound, using the element to wrap around, cut through, or open up simple building forms, define circulation paths, link or buffer adjacent uses, and focus each structure on a creek or woodland view.

A full set of trauma-responsive strategies deployed at Parrott Creek ranges from clarity of wayfinding to a special finish on bedside walls that’s comforting for kids to touch if they’re anxious in the night. Even a photovoltaic array with battery backup contributes, guarding against surprise power outages that could trigger kids’ trauma and cause chaos. “Sustainability is a measure of trauma-informed design,” Garcia says.

Images: Courtesy El Dorado

At Parrott Creek, a retreat in Oregon for traumatized teens, a network of porches provides transitions from public to private.

Images: Courtesy El Dorado

Parrott Creek—conceptual circulation diagram.

In addition to its specific strategies and solutions, Parrott Creek exemplifies TID as a process. Extensive engagement began with identifying the priorities of the nonprofit developer, Adre—to let kids be kids was No. 1—and then expanded to include the facility’s wider community: parents, grandparents, probation officers, therapists, teachers, staff, and, especially, the kids. The architects used a variety of formats for eliciting the children’s input: asking about their days, what they did on a Monday morning or a Saturday; issuing them with disposable cameras to document aspects of the site that they particularly enjoyed; and distributing magazines for making collages of their ideas about the best place to sleep (open skylights and windows) or the best place for therapy (soft furniture and monochromatic materials). In workshops, a 3D site model helped the kids to visualize ideas, and tracing paper got them sketching them like pros. “As architects, we have spatial and technical expertise,” Garcia says, “but the community, the user, is the expert in their own needs.”

As these four projects show, trauma-informed design offers ways to create environments that engender trust and healing among distressed children and youth, wherever they are. The lessons from Boys Town, for example, will become a part of every project Schutte’s team is involved with going forward, she says, “because every school in America has kids who have experienced trauma.” Whether in education, housing, or health care, “if we design through the lens of dignity, for the kids and for the staff,” Holtzinger says, “we can create enriched environments that make a real difference in people’s lives.”

Supplemental Materials:

Architectural Principles in the Service of Trauma-Informed Design. Architectural Principles in the Service of Trauma-Informed Design. Grabowska, Sam, Shopworks Architecture, Center for Housing and Homelessness Research at the University of Denver, and Group 14 Engineering. (through page 24).