The generous windows that line walls of this new apartment building in Aurora, Colorado, do more than just flood its hallways and bedrooms in sunlight: They’re part of a suite of design decisions that reflect the unique needs of its residents.
Providence at the Heights, or PATH, is a supportive housing facility operated by the prison re-entry nonprofit Second Chance Center; the three-year-old building is filled with apartments for people who have been previously incarcerated.
“Many of us have been in places where you might have a window that’s four inches wide and four feet tall,” says Second Chance founder Hassan Latif, referring to the narrow window dimensions architects use in jails as a security strategy. “At PATH, we have what we call big-ass windows.”
Designed by the Denver-based architecture firm Shopworks Architecture, the building’s interiors are filled with rich-grained wood beams, offering a calming visual and tactile texture. Dense sound insulation in each apartment provides a welcome change from the aural chaos of prison. Outside, there’s a nod to the powers of biophilia, via a restful patio with a wood pergola.
At first glance, there’s not much here that diverges from standard best practices for any supportive housing project. But there’s an added layer of intentionality and specificity directed toward people who have experienced the criminal justice system. Shopworks’ design for PATH was intensely influenced by trauma-informed design, an emerging discourse in architecture that weds the built environment to the tenets of trauma-informed care, which aims to ease the physical and mental toll from past harm.
The emphasis on TID explains why Chad Holtzinger, Shopworks founder, and his colleagues needed to have long conversations with Second Chance staffers about things like door handles, to avoid using handles that looked like ones used in prisons. And it’s why the stairwells are wide and have windows. “That’s pretty important,” says Latif, who was incarcerated for 18 years. “A lot of things have happened in stairwells for a lot of our folks. Those are types of things I wouldn’t have known to ask for.”
With TID, buildings become the “first line of therapy,” says Holtzinger. “We’re raising the awareness [of] how mental health is being neglected by the built environment.”
Trauma-informed design ranges from relatively superficial material and furnishing selections to the programmatic organization of spaces, their security protocols, and lines of sight. It’s most often seen in housing projects, education and health care. But “any setting, any place, any population will benefit from trauma-informed design,” says J. Davis Harte, director of the Design for Human Health master’s program at the Boston Architectural College and a co-founder of the Trauma-Informed Design Society, or TIDS.
The principles set forth in the TID approach start from the bedrock foundations undergirding all architecture — the “delight” portion of the classic trifecta of desirable design attributes attributed to the Roman architect Vitruvius, and the idea that the quality of space affects outlook and mood. TID takes the next step by tying these phenomena to physical and mental health, and codifying ways to ease or avoid trauma reactions.
Trauma’s origin points are adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, which can be individual and acute or communal and chronic. Examples include experiencing violence, abuse or neglect; exposure to substance abuse or mental health problems; and instability due to parental separation. As with most facets of US life, the burden of trauma is distributed unequally by race and class. Black children consistently bear higher ACE scores than white children; the share of kids with two or more ACEs is highest for Indigenous people, at 36.2%.
Because of the stigma that comes with admitting to trauma, clients can be reluctant to pursue TID, says Erin Peavey, who leads design for health and well-being at the architecture firm HKS. The response is often: “Oh, are you saying that my kid is traumatized? Or are you saying that I’m traumatized?” she says.
The answer is an emphatic yes. ACEs are extremely common: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that 61% of US adults surveyed across 25 states report that they have experienced at least one type of ACE before age 18, and 1 in 6 report they have four or more. A 10% reduction in ACEs could save $56 billion in health-care costs, the CDC estimates, as ACEs have been linked to physical injury, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and suicide. For children, trauma can inhibit brain development, affecting attention, learning and decision making.
The rise of trauma-informed design in architectural discourse is likely linked to the other great public health threat of our age: Covid-19. Beyond underscoring the link between one’s immediate environment and health, the pandemic was itself a mass trauma experience, bringing a tidal wave of death, illness, economic disruption and social isolation.
TID starts with cataloguing sensory and spatial triggers to avoid — disruptive sounds, a lack of real or perceived security, visual noise, and unclear wayfinding, which can include blind turns, blocked sightlines and indistinguishable corridors. Designers shun items common in dour institutional buildings that many people may associate with trauma, like drop-ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights.
Shopworks has been a leader in formalizing and categorizing an architectural language for TID, through three reports funded and supported by the University of Denver Center for Housing and Homelessness Research and the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority. Their commitment was rigorous enough that Shopworks Chief Operating Officer Laura Rossbert joined the firm after working as interim executive director for one of their supportive housing clients, and CHFA now asks housing providers how they’ll approach TID.
These guidelines emphasize the healing power of social spaces and communal interaction, balanced with the need for safety and security. The reports recommend “sensory boundaries” — formal and material divisions that allow people to modulate their exposure to stimulation. These can include screens and transitions marked by different materials, like windows for interior rooms, perforated barriers or three-quarter-length walls. For example: In the lobby of The Stella, a supportive affordable housing project in Denver for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, Shopworks lined a double-height lobby wall with wood shingles, which help absorb excess sound.
Shopworks’ concept of “nested layers” divides space by its potential for interaction, offering people choices on a wide spectrum of sociability: forums for large public events but also quiet nooks and niches for retreat and relaxation. This variation in volume and proportion should have clear transitions, along a gradient of surveillance and autonomy. Holtzinger calls it the ability to “have introverted places within an extroverted environment.”
“Identity anchors” are the least explicitly design-related element of TID: They focus on creating places for community that inhabitants can inscribe with their culture, such as bookshelves, mural walls and garden plots. At PATH, for example, designers placed small shelves outside of apartments doors for residents to display important items that speak to who they are.
Distilling these principles into architecture requires granular community outreach that takes the community and individuals’ specific trauma reactions into account. “There cannot be a good design unless all of the stakeholders sit at the same table,” says Alina Osnaga, a graduate researcher at Lawrence Technological University that specializes in TID.
Unpacking trauma reaction triggers means observing how community members use their space and the routes they take to travel through it. Shopworks often starts by asking residents when and where they feel safe, and trying to emulate this.
The answers can be idiosyncratic and not directly related to architecture. For Naomi’s House, a residential support facility for women sex trafficking victims in suburban Chicago, Designs for Dignity worked with Elizabeth Pasquinelli of Debaun Studio and Nicholas Moriarty to shape the facility’s interior. Women at the shelter requested something to hold close during emotionally vulnerable moments. So the designers provided couches that are piled high with throw pillows.
Bridging the gap between individual trauma responses and creating a cohesive architecture plan that works for everyone is something “I think we get asked once a day,” says Janet Roche, a co-founder of TIDS.
The key here is designing “as much choice as possible” into spaces, says Christine Cowart, the third TIDS co-founder. This means ensuring that as different people with different trauma responses move through a space, or as people’s desires change from hour to hour or day to day, there’s always a place for them to be. It can be a careful balance. A grand atrium can be an exciting place for large social events, but it can also be overwhelming, says Cowart, if “you don’t feel like you have a place of shelter.”
The St. Francis Warren Residences in Denver, a former Methodist church that Shopworks transformed into a supportive housing facility, demonstrates this kind of choice. There, the architects slotted a small satellite sitting area on the upper floor of a double-height atrium containing a communal kitchen; visually connected, but spatially distant.
So far, trauma-informed design has been applied to a relatively narrow set of building types, but there’s hope its influence will expand into wider use in residential and commercial buildings. Office spaces, currently reeling from the Covid-era embrace of remote work patterns, are particularly ripe for TID revaluation, says HKS’s Peavey, as employers and workers alike increasingly acknowledge that going to the office is fundamentally for social interaction — which TID emphasizes as a factor of health — and not pounding out work.
Osnaga says that large retail environments like malls are also ready for a TID appraisal, as are buildings with complex circulation patterns, like airports. Cowart sees opportunities for TID in correctional facilities, though the punitive nature of these spaces means administrators and civic officials may resist humanizing them. Beyond raising the question of whether jails and prisons can be architecturally reformed, this potential is a reminder that some parts of the built environment, also designed by architects, are explicitly made to inflict trauma, and that because of this, TID is a harm mitigation project, not a solution to a wider systemic crisis.
What’s needed to move trauma-informed design into the mainstream, Holtzinger says, is more policy analysis and data on its effectiveness. TID doesn’t necessarily add costs, and calming and tranquil TID-based environments could ease maintenance demands and increase building durability, requiring fewer security staff and repair expenses.
“What it costs is a little bit of time,” says Holtzinger. “We’ve never once run into a project where we couldn’t get into budget with these principles.”
Osnaga, from Lawrence Tech, agrees. “Once you have enough data, you can correlate the impact of your trauma-informed design return on investment for the owners,” she says.
But is there anything about trauma-informed design that’s not just good design? Simply paying attention to the quality of space for marginalized and traumatized populations is a rare thing, and it demonstrates care that’s itself trauma-mitigating. Proponents of TID often invoke Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, with the physiological base of this pyramid fulfilled by architecture’s fundamental purpose (shelter from the elements and personal safety) and its higher reaches achieved by the TID features that encourage belonging and self-actualization.
TID’s points of emphasis pivot around the specific needs of the building’s users, which makes designers’ assumed intuition about what a “good design” is all the more suspect. Shopworks’ Rossbert described her approach to planning the Delores Apartments at Arroyo Village, a supportive housing project for formerly homeless people in Denver: “What makes it unique is making sure we’re not assuming that what feels good to me as somebody that’s always been housed is the same for everybody, because it’s not.”
Shifting definitions of trauma may make drawing a line between TID and standard best practices irrelevant.
Young people in the US, whose mental health has been declared a national emergency by the American Academy of Pediatrics, face a widening circle of stress, says Peavey, from the catastrophe of climate change to the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and the ever-present specter of gun violence. “We’re seeing the younger generation have worse mental health than ever before,” she says. “[They’re] having to deal with this on a scale that feels unfathomable.”
From this perspective, there’s no need to draw a distinction between trauma-informed design and quality design, period; the trauma is too widespread. But so are the ways to shape the built world to soften its hold.