Allison Rutz

Empowered Healing embodies and expands on trauma-informed design principles through textile arts. Traditionally regarded as a women's occupation, both as chore and craft, textile arts have developed into a mode of political and social expression and have recently shown value as tools in mental health therapy. This project addresses the growing need for private and group therapy clinics in New York City, proposing a cognitive therapy clinic employing textile arts as a means of fostering autonomy, self-esteem, and community for survivors of sexual assault. Existing trauma-informed frameworks involve users during the design process but provide little opportunity for them to fully engage with the therapy space after occupancy. The Empowered Healing textile and cognitive therapy clinic challenges this framework by incorporating new spatial mechanisms that promote engagement on multiple levels. Each space is designed both to house textile art programming and to allow for the co-creation of the interior itself. Interactive weaving walls, built-in millwork, and adaptable furniture combine to form a single ever-evolving space. These mechanisms allow the interior to adapt to user and programmatic needs while enabling users to experience the psychological power of making. The users become the designers of the interior space, building and modifying their surroundings in a continuous daily process throughout their healing journey. What results is an ever-changing organism created in a manner that shifts the interior from the periphery to the center of the healing process and the user experience.