Community center for homeless teens: Physical environment as a tool to empower vulnerable youth
Abstract
Homeless youth in America are an example of the failure of societal infrastructure on many levels. They either slip through the cracks and are forced into prostitution, gangs, or other illicit activity simply to survive, or they are shuffled between various institutions, foster homes, juvenile detention centers, or medical facilities, where they are often treated as numbers and statistics rather than children. In order to regain dignity and worth in the eyes of society and themselves, vulnerable youth must be given back the right and responsibility to make their own choices and control their own lives. Pivot, a non-profit organization in Oklahoma City, does this through a comprehensive program that begins with meeting their clients' basic physical needs, and proceeds to address mental and emotional health and other life skills that adolescents need to learn. Physical environment can and should be yet another tool in Pivot's arsenal that empowers youth to take control of their own lives. The proposed design provides an example of this active participation in the healing process - it is not simply an artistic expression of a poetic concept, but a physical means by which actual healing processes can occur. This project forgoes the usual architectural tendency to dictate user experience, and instead provides a safe space in which a client base accustomed to being pushed around by various authorities can instead explore their own agency through extensive environmental manipulation. The architecture of this facility will empower its users to create and recreate the physical space around them, endowing them with a power over their lives that they have so consistently been denied.