Design for a psychotherapist's office
y 6 weeks playing at being
an architecture student, in the 1981 Harvard Career Discovery Program,
was back in the era when architectural design was still a hand craft (T-square
and drafting table...). I had some talent for expressing my ideas in
"mechanical drawing", but my lack of freehand drawing facility proved an
insuperable barrier to getting into a prestige M.Arch. program (i.e., a school
that had graduate dorms, so that one could devote oneself
to studying instead of also having to cope with logistics of "living").
My interest in architecture continued,
however, and when I bought a Macintosh Mac Plus computer in 1990, one of the applications
I bought was Claris CAD, which cost half as much as the computer (ca.
$600). My aptitude for "mechanical drawing", and my experience making
computer graphic art with a primitive
IBM mainframe-based CAD program (YDS), carried over into quickly
becoming adept with Claris CAD. It became a tool I could
think with (as opposed to being an opaque medium with which I would have
to struggle to get any ideas "through" -- like freehand drawing, or,
in the computer world, OOP, Java, the Windows API...).
I like to engage with things that
interest me from many different perspectives. Consequently, when I enrolled
in a psychoanalytic training program (1990-94), one of the
ways I engaged with that subject was by designing an office for a
psychotherapist -- thinking about how to make it as good as possible a place to
do therapy, imagining what it would be like to do therapy in
such a space, etc. I had hoped this creative approach to
thinking about psychoanalysis would appeal to the training institute's
faculty, since psychoanalysis is largely "about"
imagination -- but it didn't. (The resulting design is reproduced
above. On 24 July 1998, a graphic artist at Grolier Inc.
scanned a printout from the Apple Imagewriter II dot-matrix
printer I had when I did the design, to generate a .gif file; I
apologize that the image-quality is somewhat compromised due to
the original having been not exactly "aligned straight" on the scanner.)
he picture is turned on its side, to
fit the computer screen better. The site for the office is a small
plot of urban land, 40 by 30 feet, with the back and both sides "blind", and
the front (bottom, as shown) side open to the street (butting right up to
the sidewalk). The main entrance is recessed, so that persons entering and
leaving have some shelter from the weather, as well as the symbolism of a
"transitional space" (ref.: D.W. Winnicott). A second door allows service access without intruding on
therapist or patient. To relieve the claustrophobic enclosure of the site, there are two interior
"dry gardens": rock gardens in the
Japanese style (Ryoanji, etc. -- or perhaps a moss garden,
like Saihoji). The therapist has a small
kitchen / business office, where he or she can work and relax, away from
the patients, and which a bookkeeper could enter and leave without
intruding on therapy sessions. The waiting room doubles as a group therapy room (conference
or lecture room, etc.).
In general, I tried to "pack" as rich a
variety of spaces and perspectives as possible into the small area; this
intention was greatly enhanced by placing the big (waiting / group...) room on
an angle. I don't think this rotation is simply a [postmodernist] "trick", which, once
one saw it, would become stale, like "yesterday's surprise ending" in a movie. It
really did enable me to use the space more effectively, and add more nuances,
which, hopefully, would continue to yield
satisfaction, through repeated contemplation and study over the many years
of a patient's analysis, and the therapist's whole lifetime.
In doing the design,
I imagined myself working in the space: treating patients, greeting them
in the waiting room, getting a snack from the refrigerator in
the back office, looking at the gardens in the early morning and late
evening, before the first patient of the day and after the last... -- and
I felt it would be a nice place to
do good work. I especially thought the views of the dry gardens, from the therapy
room, the waiting / group room, and from the little "business office", would
be refreshing and encourage imagination, through the peacefulness of the raked
gravel, with perhaps a few good rocks and or small trees (there
are even smaller dry gardens in some Japanese temples). (See my
Leisure is the Basis of Culture page for
more information about these aspirations.)
I hope you find some pleasure and value in this design.
Return to student apartment design.
[View intro: Architecture and morality ]
Return to rare book study pavillion: Le Pavillion d'Un.
See |
[real] garden I designed, inspired by "Wedded rocks" at Ise (Japan). |
Learn why a city can deserve to exist (Louis Kahn). |
|
Read |
my doctoral dissertation: Communication: The social matrix
of supervision of psychotherapy. |
Hear |
the kind of communicative interactions that mess up persons' "heads" so that
they need psychotherapy. |
Read |
my essay on Sigmund Freud's: Civilization and its discontents. | |
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Play with signifiers (cultivate your fantasy life).
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http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/psychoffice.html
Copyright © 1998-2002 Brad McCormick, Ed.D.
bradmcc@cloud9.net ![[ Email me! ]](gif/email2me.gif)
15 May 2006CE (2006-05-15 ISO 8601)
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