Mindful Spaces

At CannonDesign, a studio is dedicated to bringing behavioral-health-care patients back to their everyday lives.

- Katie Okamoto

The threshold holds special fascination for architects. A doorway, hall, or garden is a spatial manifestation of transition between two phases and can make all the difference in the experience of both. In the design of mental-health-care spaces, where a patient may literally enter in one state and exit in another, the threshold is particularly important.

“We look at the sequencing as you move from the outside through the inside,” says Stephanie Vito, a lead architect in the behavioral-health studio at Cannon Design. “We really spend a lot of time looking at the nuances.”

With 27 people—architects, planners, designers, engineers, programmers, and advisers—spread over six of the firm’s offices in the United States and Canada, the studio operates as a pool of experts tapped to helm projects in the highly specialized field of behavioral-healthcare design, in which everything from drywall to faucets requires consideration different from that in other health-care environments. Cannon Design has been creating behavioral-health-care spaces for three decades, so it has had ample opportunity to track the field’s evolution. When the firm’s first behavioral-healthcare facility, Canada’s Ontario Shores (then Whitby Psychiatric Hospital), opened in 1996, it was considered a watershed project. “The facility was based on wellness—helping patients get well,” says Tim Rommel, a behavioral health architect who directs the studio. “Previous to that, most were more like long-term-care facilities. Patient lengths of stay were measured in years versus months or days.”