Pratt Interior Design Research: A. Cooney

Therapy is a healing process. This process exteriorizes the individual’s emotional interior, so it can be viewed, discussed and understood from a different perspective. When the internal is projected outside, and perceived, transformation occurs. This transformation can occur through different means, including talking (talk therapy) and art-making (art therapy).

Talk therapy occurs in the therapist’s office, which often occupies an apartment in a residential building or a suite in an office building. Therapy lives in the borrowed architectural typologies of domesticity and work, neither of which was designed for this particular activity.

Art therapy occurs in a variety of settings: clinical, educational, executive or studio. Like talk therapy, art therapy does not have an architectural typology of its own.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate and propose an architectural typology that facilitates the therapeutic process and its potential for transformation.

Therefore a definition of therapy is necessary. Talk therapy occupies linguistic space and involves verbal communication, while art therapy occupies visual space and involves visual communication. Defined in this broader context of communication, talk therapy and art therapy are given the freedom to walk out of the therapist’s office and perambulate within a broader spectrum of programming, users, and thus, architecture. If the hard core of psychotherapy involves a therapist and a patient, its concentric ripples involve any meaningful, healing interaction and communication of thoughts and feelings. An artist’s exhibition can be therapeutic, for both artist and viewer. A conversation with a trusted friend can be therapeutic, and so can a walk through a stimulating environment.

Therapy thus defined extends outward to people who may not see a therapist. Therapy thus weaves itself into the fabric of the community.

I am advocating the creation of the Urban Transformative. This will be space for therapy, its hard core and its ripples. This will be a multi-use space, or a series of spaces, with variable privacy, and which will include talk therapy, individual or group therapy, and art therapy with an exhibition component.

Seen in this light, the proposal of an architectural typology for the therapeutic process entails a multi-faceted investigation of the relationship between mind, body, and space. What is the relationship between sitting and talking, walking and talking, viewing and healing, inside and outside?

The exhibition component serves as a link to the general public. This project is located in Chelsea, an area densely populated by art galleries and traversed by the High Line, which will become a public outdoor space.

Exhibitions and the future development of the High Line involve perambulation. Traditionally, talk therapy is conducted while sitting on comfortable furniture. This project will investigate the relationship between therapy and perambulation in the context of the pedestrian interior. Can the pedestrian interior form a new architectural typology for therapy?

This project investigates an architecture that, in itself, transforms the traditional healing process by incorporating talk therapy and art therapy, by creating a therapeutic locus that can be experienced in a variety of ways, sitting and walking, private and public and by extending therapy to the general public via exhibition space.