Holistic Health Center + Tornado Relief Shelter

Shavasana

“Shavasana” fosters community ties within Moore and reduces the stress of it’s citizens caused by both life and tornadoes. The building creates a gradient of different spacial properties which allows for the individual to find an environment that suits oneself the most. By improving the comfort of people in their environment, “Shavasana” encourages the interaction of people causing new connections to be made. In times of disaster, its the people around oneself; friends, family and neighbors, that aid in bringing peace of mind back to ones life. “Shavasana” will help Moore find this peace of mind, unite its citizens and recover from disaster.

In Shavasana Pose, we symbolically “die” to our old ways of thinking and doing. The normally perceived boundaries of body image dissolve, and we enter a state of blissful neutrality.

Everyone copes with the ebbs and flows of life differently. To accommodate this and help people of all types find their internal peace, a gradient of space, from serene to playful was desired. To accomplish this, precedents that exemplified both feelings were analyzed to reveal core design parameters that gave space a serene or playful feeling. The building parti became the guide that enables us to quantify if the spaces we were creating had the desired feelings.

For the site, a separate parti was developed to help ensure the experience of entering the structure made the visitors feel safe as they entered. The manipulation of the ground plane into walls, roofs, and enclosed spaces implements this parti and not only provides feelings of safety and exposure, but integrates it the structure into the site. Visitors flow from space to space based on feel, experiencing how the manipulated ground plane has a unique phenomenological effect depending upon its location in space.