These Architecture Students Explore the Healing Power of Water

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ive 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.”

A Metaphor for Healing

Water also becomes a key driver for School of Visual Arts senior Morgan Jourdin’s design to house Caribbean immigrant families in New York City’s West Village. The interior design student’s project responds to the trauma experienced by immigrants arriving after perilous journeys across the water. The project incorporates P-traps, used to filter sediments in plumbing mechanisms, as a metaphor for the protective, soothing, and healing properties of water. The design concept becomes a form factor in a residential structure that celebrates water through scalloped shapes, scuppers extending from floor plates, a hydroponic garden, and water collection tanks.

Celebrating Water Infrastructure

Other projects celebrate water infrastructure and its historic importance for places. For a pier renovation design by interior architecture master’s student Alexia Solis at the University of Oregon, a deteriorating industrial site in San Luis Obispo, California, is elevated into a place animating the port’s importance to the town’s history. The renovated pier supports public education, pedestrian access, recreational kayaking, and ocean exploration.

Second-year Clemson M. Arch graduate student Jared Cook also wanted to celebrate water infrastructure, using a signature mixed-use tower in Midtown Manhattan to expose functions hidden belowground. Grand Water Station would hold water within a massive storage tank on the interior, visible through its facade, and reroute Park Avenue traffic beneath it. Designed in collaboration with Andreina Sojo, the project takes cues from Grand Central Station’s monumentalizing of rail transport through a major public building and the ongoing construction of a new tunnel from Yonkers, bringing additional fresh water into the city. “My partner and I asked ourselves, ‘Where is the celebration of water?’” Cook says. “‘Where is the infrastructure that is built to house and celebrate it, and where is its existence in the city?’”