body as a house | ajdinvukovic

Body as a House
exploring embodied trauma therapy through space
diploma thesis + project at the institute of building theory and design, TU Vienna

project overview

Trauma is a person’s emotional response to a distressing experience. Few people can go through life without encountering some kind of trauma. Unlike ordinary hardships, traumatic events tend to be sudden and unpredictable, involve a severe threat to life - like bodily injury or death - and feel beyond a per- son’s control.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has been the standard of care for the last 30 years. The client would recline on a couch, while the therapist would push conversations in order to evoke new realizations in the patient's perception.

But trauma impacts much more than just our thoughts and actions. Trauma is far-reaching and systemic - it cuts us to our bones. It can dissolve our sense of identity, diminish our capacity to locate our- selves accurately in time and space, inhibit our tolerance for interpersonal relatedness, and so much more - just like architecture can.

New treatment methods, such as dance-, body- and constellation therapy, incorporate the body‘s wisdom and pave the way for promising big outcomes in trauma care. Through such different use, they demand radically different typologies in architecture.

The Thesis Body as a House - Mind, Experience, and Space in the Transformation of Trauma investigates those novel treatments and uses neuroscientific achievement, to create new narratives for trauma-informed design. Pushing for the agenda of mental health as a public concern, the thesis project explores on the intersection of public life and mental health on a site at Donaukanal, Vienna.