“Criptographies:
Disability Culture and the Spatial Imaginary”

The Asylum Project: Spaces of Amnesty, Refuge, and Sanctuary focuses on designing an annotated landscape and spatial propositions that help young people de-stress and refocus cognitive-creative labor. To be sure, the term asylum has a contested history relative to mental health. Criptographies reclaims the asylum as a site of refuge, in order to intentionally connect the politics of space to an architecture of collective well-being.

The studio partnered with Garrett’s Space, an Ann Arbor based non-profit organization dedicated to reducing suicides and filling critical care gaps for young adults ages 18 to 28 facing significant mental health challenges. The Asylum Project echoes many of the values and ambitions of Garrett’s Space, and seeks to expand the role of architecture in locating spaces of support and interdependence that help young people connect to the land, environment, and with eachother.

Criptographies disrupt regimes of fitness and spatial ableism presiding over architectural education that resist formulaic approaches to design. Working within a Disability Studies framework, the studio motivated design research around the precarities of intersectional identies that demand an equally intersectional architecture.

This studio is dedicated in memory of Garrett Halpert.