Architectures of Care: Healing Spaces Across Cultures

In this context, architecture becomes a material expression of cultural understandings of health. For example, in Indigenous traditions across the Americas, healing spaces are often organized around communion with nature and ritual circularity. In Japan, minimalist aesthetics and integration with the natural environment reflect a pursuit of inner balance and harmony. Despite cultural differences, contact with nature consistently emerges as a unifying element in healing practices. When incorporated into architectural design along with other elements explored throughout this text, this connection invites us to understand the environment not simply as a physical container but as an active participant in the healing process, responsive to the symbolic and emotional dimensions of human experience.

Ancient Healing Spaces: Latin America

Among many Indigenous peoples of Latin America, healing is understood as a collective and spiritual journey centered on reconnection with nature, ancestors, and community. Illness is often perceived as a disruption in the balance between humans and the natural or spiritual world. In this context, healing becomes a return to the collective, to the sacred, and to the ecosystem of which the individual is a part. Healing spaces are typically circular, constructed from natural materials, and open to the elements, incorporating fire and water as therapeutic components. In Brazil, the malocas—Indigenous communal houses—also function as spaces of collective healing. Within these large wooden and thatched structures, healing takes place in a circle, through shared storytelling, the presence of elders, and attentive listening to both the body and the forest.

Architecture and Nature: Japan and Shinrin-yoku

In Japan, where Shinto and Buddhist philosophies shape cultural understandings, healing is seen as the restoration of spiritual and energetic balance, often linked to the concept of ki (vital energy). The body, mind, and spirit are viewed as inseparable. Healing, in this worldview, involves achieving serenity within the natural flow of existence. Accordingly, healing spaces are designed to promote contemplation, introspection, and respect for natural rhythms.

The Japanese practice of Shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing,” exemplifies the central role of nature in supporting mental and physical restoration. Tranquil, minimalist environments in harmony with their surroundings—such as Zen gardens and tea houses—embody an aesthetic of healing grounded in simplicity and reflection. In these spaces, silence and openness become part of the remedy. Traditional Ryokans, or Japanese inns, often include open-air hot springs (onsen) nestled within carefully curated gardens. These environments are constructed using natural materials such as wood and stone, designed to foster a deep connection between the individual and the natural world. Zen gardens, while contemplative, also serve as meditative spaces of healing. The repetitive patterns in sand and the intentional placement of stones and plants support interior quietude. Traditional Japanese architecture values emptiness as a crucial spatial component—one that, in the context of healing, symbolizes openness, breathing space, and energetic flow.

Healing and Community: West Africa

In African cosmologies, particularly among the Yorùbá, Ashanti, and Dogon peoples, healing is inseparable from community, ancestry, and spirituality. Illness may signify not only physical suffering, but also ethical, spiritual, or social imbalance. Healing spaces are thus not clinical, but ritualistic, symbolic, and designed to gather and direct energy. Community-based rituals involving music, dance, and oral storytelling bring people together in support of an individual’s healing. In this framework, healing is a shared rather than solitary endeavor.. Architectural spaces are typically open, promoting the free flow of people and aligning with natural elements such as sunlight, wind, and seasonal cycles. Architecture, in this context, becomes a narrative form: every structure and ornament carries stories and meanings that actively contribute to the emotional and spiritual healing process.

Sacred Architecture as Healing: India

In Indian traditions, particularly within the frameworks of Ayurveda and Yoga, healing is understood as a process of harmonization between the elements of the body and universal forces. The human being is composed of doshas (vata, pitta, kapha), and health depends on the balance among them. Temples in India function not only as places of worship but also as centers of physical and spiritual healing. Ayurveda, the traditional system of medicine, has long regarded the environment as integral to the healing process. Ayurvedic hospitals—such as Arya Vaidya Sala in Kerala—are designed with inner gardens, water channels, and cross-ventilated rooms, all following the principles of Vastu Shastra, which emphasize natural light and cosmic orientation. Similarly, ashrams, or spiritual communities, are structured to encourage introspection, simplicity, and connection with nature. The architecture of these spaces emphasizes the use of local materials and the creation of environments that foster tranquility, restoration, and spiritual connection.

Empathy and Humanization: Contemporary Hospitals

In the West, where biomedicine has historically dominated, healing was long equated with the elimination of disease. However, this perspective has gradually broadened over the past few decades. Healing is increasingly seen as a personal process of well-being, reconnection, and meaning-making. As a result, hospitals and clinics are being redesigned to incorporate nature, art, and a sense of hospitality. In this changing landscape, architects and healthcare professionals are drawing inspiration from cultural traditions. Spaces that offer natural light, integrated greenery, artwork, areas for spiritual practice, and opportunities for quiet reflection are now considered essential components of the healing process.

One example is Maggie’s Centre in the United Kingdom, a network of cancer support centers designed by renowned architects such as Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster. Each center is conceived as a welcoming refuge, incorporating gardens, soft lighting, open layouts, and homelike atmospheres—a deliberate contrast to the sterility of conventional hospitals. In Brazil, institutions such as the Sarah Kubitschek Hospital in Brasília stand out for their spacious interiors, internal gardens, and corridors filled with natural light, illustrating how architectural design can impact patient recovery.

These diverse perspectives on care and healing remind us that healing does not reside solely in medicine or technology. It is also found in the design of space, in the quality of human relationships, in attentive listening, and in honoring the stories and traditions that each culture carries. As these examples show, in many worldviews, healing is above all a process of reestablishing connections with nature, with others, with one’s inner self, and with the sacred. When attuned to these dimensions, the architecture of healing spaces becomes more than a physical structure—it becomes a symbolic terrain where care takes form and becomes tangible.

This article is part of the ArchDaily Topics: Building Wellbeing: Designing Spaces for Healing, presented in collaboration with the Hushoffice.

With its line of A-class pods Hushoffice helps create acoustically balanced workplaces that offer great environment for collaboration and focus, foster employee wellbeing, and accommodate the needs of neurodiverse staff, as well as employees with motor impairments.

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