Faculty of Design
Environmental Design
Anisha .
Align: A Youth Social Integration Typology
Environmental Design
2025
Set on a reclaimed peninsula in Tommy Thompson Park, Align is a civic infrastructure project designed to support youth with disabilities (YWD), aged 15–30, whose access to autonomy, identity development, and public authorship has been disrupted by long-standing structural exclusion. The project responds to both the external systems that produce this exclusion and the internal consequences it leaves behind—fractured self-concept, delayed developmental pacing, and conditioned patterns of withdrawal.The site’s geography offers a useful balance: removed from institutional concentration, yet situated within public circulation. This allows for a civic presence that is visible but not exposed—accessible, but not immediately subject to normative expectations. The location becomes a threshold: a space where relational norms and user rhythms can be reset.The architecture is organized into five looping clusters—Library Café, Vocational Hub, Wellness Center, Spiritual Hall (Psyrah), and Social Integration Hall—arranged around a central courtyard. Each cluster supports a different aspect of life-stage repair: vocational delay, emotional regulation, re-entry into public life, or protected identity work. The layout is intentionally non-hierarchical and non-linear, allowing users to set their own pace and route through the system.Protected-use spaces are designated exclusively for YWD. This is not about separation, but about offering time and space for development that cannot safely or productively occur in public. Other clusters, such as the café and Integration Hall, are designed to allow public interaction without requiring performance, spectacle, or explanation from disabled users.Architectural strategies throughout the project aim to reduce cognitive load and support autonomy. These include redundant circulation paths, intuitive spatial suggestion, acoustic zoning, and differentiated thresholds that signal transitions without enforcing them. These tactics are grounded in cognitive research and trauma-informed design principles, and aim to help users navigate space with clarity, not pressure.The Vocational Hub engages institutional partners but avoids defaulting to output-driven models. Participation is structured around user capacity—not productivity or efficiency. Instead of simulating inclusion, the space allows for rehearsal, pacing, and authorship without standardization.Align does not present itself as a definitive solution to systemic exclusion. Instead, it offers a spatial system that attempts to respond—with care, complexity, and restraint—to the conditions that exclusion produces. It works within public infrastructure while operating on a different logic, one shaped by protection, autonomy, and developmental flexibility.Its goal is not to dismantle systems outright, but to propose—in built form—an alternate set of priorities that might take hold through repeated occupation, slow cultural shifts, and the quiet practice of being treated differently by design.
“Align is a spatial response to the layered impacts of exclusion faced by youth with disabilities. Grounded in research across disability theory, cognitive science, and systems thinking, the project explores how architecture can hold space for delayed development, protect autonomy, and reshape public participation—without demanding adaptation to existing norms. Rather than proposing escape or spectacle, Align situates itself within the public realm while operating on different terms.”
Work by
Anisha .
Environmental Design
“Design is not a layer added onto life - it is the structure life unfolds within. My work moves beyond troubleshooting symptoms of exclusion to reverse-engineer the systems that produce them. Through...” [More]
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