Architecture & Design
Case Studies
This collection of case studies represents both the culminating research for my Bachelor of Arts in Interior Design at Bellevue College in Washington State and a foundational step toward the most significant project of my professional life. Through architectural and interior design analysis, these studies examine how space can support healing, belonging, and empowerment within schools, dormitories, clinics, and communal environments. The research directly informs the design of the El Roi Center for Women and Children Empowerment in Northern Nigeria, a project rooted in trauma-informed care and community restoration. While awaiting the opportunity to build, this work serves as a deliberate period of preparation, allowing precedent, reflection, and critical study to guide every future design decision. Together, these case studies document how research becomes readiness, and how design begins long before construction.
El Roi Mekonah: Architecture of Healing and Visibility
This case study examines the Maggie’s Centre Dundee by Kengo Kuma & Associates as a model for designing trauma-informed spaces that prioritize healing, visibility, and belonging. Through analysis of spatial organization, material choices, natural light, circulation patterns, and integration with landscape, the study highlights how architectural design can nurture emotional recovery and social reconnection. The project demonstrates that non-institutional, human-scaled spaces with gentle transitions, soft materials, and domestic qualities support dignity and agency for users. Lessons drawn from Maggie’s Centre inform the design of El Roi Mekonah in Jos, Nigeria, an orphanage and school focused on children’s trauma recovery. By translating principles of openness, warmth, and layered privacy to a Nigerian context, Mekonah seeks to create an environment where children feel safe, valued, and able to grow. This study underscores the role of architecture as a vessel for empathy, illustrating how spatial design can actively contribute to emotional and psychological well-being.
Belonging: Architecture as Community in Childhood Environments
This case study investigates how architectural design can cultivate a sense of belonging in childhood environments through spatial organization, transparency, and community-oriented circulation. The Loris Malaguzzi International Centre in Reggio Emilia, Italy, serves as the primary reference for examining how built form supports emotional safety, autonomy, and collective identity for children, families, and educators. Adaptively reused from an industrial warehouse complex, the project operates as a civic “small city,” integrating shared piazzas, ateliers, and informal gathering spaces to dissolve boundaries between learning, community, and public life. The study analyzes context, spatial hierarchy, circulation patterns, geometry, massing, and environmental strategies to understand how belonging is produced through architecture rather than imposed through program. Central gathering nodes, radial circulation, soft thresholds, and human-scaled massing allow children to navigate between visibility and retreat, fostering agency and relational comfort. Particular attention is given to the role of transparency, daylight, and gentle movement sequences in reducing anxiety and supporting emotional regulation. While the Malaguzzi Centre is not explicitly designed for trauma recovery, its spatial strategies offer transferable lessons for trauma-informed educational and residential design. These findings directly inform the El Roi Mekonah Project in Kaduna, Nigeria, guiding the design of dormitories, classrooms, and courtyards that prioritize community, dignity, and emotional connection. This case study argues that belonging is not merely a social condition but a spatial one, constructed through architecture that listens to children and reflects their need to feel seen, anchored, and connected.
Maggie’s Leeds Domestic Refuge:
Safety, Thresholds, and Sensory Comfort
This case study examines Maggie’s Leeds Centre as a model for trauma-informed architectural design that prioritizes emotional safety without resorting to institutional form. Located on the St James’s University Hospital campus in Leeds, UK, the project employs domestic scale, layered thresholds, and sensory regulation to create refuge for vulnerable users. Through the use of sculptural roofed planters, a centrally positioned communal kitchen, and garden-based enclosure, the building balances openness with protection while maintaining a non-clinical atmosphere. The study analyzes spatial organization, circulation, geometry, massing, and environmental strategies to understand how architecture communicates safety through predictability, material softness, and controlled visual permeability. Particular attention is given to how planted volumes function simultaneously as landscape, enclosure, and sensory buffer, offering privacy while supporting connection to nature. Although Maggie’s Leeds serves adults with cancer, its architectural principles are examined for their applicability to trauma-sensitive environments for children. The findings directly inform the early design framework for the El Roi Mekonah project, a residential and educational environment for children healing from trauma in Nigeria. This case study argues that architecture can operate as a form of care, using scale, light, texture, and thresholds to support autonomy, emotional regulation, and dignity. Maggie’s Leeds demonstrates that healing environments are shaped not by clinical efficiency, but by spaces that allow users to choose connection or retreat within a clearly legible and emotionally grounded spatial system.
