Cultivating Care: Spatial practices of healing, refuge & reconnection
Cultivating Care is a trauma informed wellbeing center for survivors of domestic abuse, exploring how architecture can support healing through control, privacy and connection to nature. Informed by wider research into trauma informed design, psychology and restorative environments, the project investigates how spatial experience can influence emotional wellbeing, using architecture as a tool to support individual retreat and collective recovery. Rooted in feminist approaches to design, the proposal challenges institutional models of refuge by creating spaces that prioritise autonomy and lived experience.
Located in Old Trafford, Manchester, the project is organised through a multilevel pinwheel layout that creates spatial gradients between public, semi-private and private environments. Carefully sequenced thresholds allow users to choose their level of visibility, interaction and retreat throughout the building. Nature operates as a key healing device within the project, integrated through workshop programs, a winter garden, landscape routes, therapeutic planting and biodiverse courtyard spaces that encourage grounding, reflection and reconnection. The project also explores care at multiple scales: care for people through sensory comfort and emotional safety; care for community through skill-sharing workshops and social integration and care for ecology through biodiverse planting, reclaimed materials and passive environmental systems.
My wider interests lie in the psychology of space and how architecture and interiors influence behaviour, emotion and wellbeing through atmosphere, materiality and sensory experience. I am particularly interested in therapeutic and residential environments, exploring how design can shape feelings of comfort and belonging for occupants within a space. Praxis Atelier has strengthened my interest in emotionally responsive and user-centred design, encouraging me to think critically about whose needs are prioritised within the built environment and how architecture can create meaningful social impact through care led spatial design.
