The research question
How might housing design respond more carefully to the needs of adolescents who have experienced trauma? Empowering Adolescents, prepared for the McNeill Common Good Fellowship in Summer 2024, examines this question through literature and discussion of residential design precedents.
Design concepts and precedents
The paper organizes its design inquiry around safety, choice, community and comfort. It considers how a home can offer both privacy and shared life: places to withdraw, opportunities to personalize a room, welcoming communal space, and attention to light, sound, materials and access to nature.
Published housing examples, including Avenida del Sol, Arroyo Village and Laurel House, are discussed as precedents for design thinking. The web overview presents the questions and concepts explored in that reading; it does not attribute measured changes in residents’ health or school performance to these projects.
From literature to design inquiry
The accompanying Resilient Futures exercise explores a hypothetical application of these ideas. Its proposals belong to the design-study part of the work, rather than an observed housing project or an evaluation of residents.
The central architectural question is how to make room for agency without assuming that every resident needs the same environment. A quiet space, a choice of routes or a shared garden becomes a design proposition to discuss with residents and practitioners. The work develops those propositions as a basis for further inquiry.
Source and reading context
This overview draws from Empowering Adolescents: Implementing Trauma-Informed Design in Low-Income Urban Housing, Adam Scott’s paper dated .
Ames and Loebach (2023), Applying Trauma-Informed Design Principles to Therapeutic Residential Care Facilities, pp. 805–817
A conceptual review connecting residential care and trauma-informed design; it frames possibilities for further study.