We talk to Jason Danziger from the German studio thinkbuild architecture about colour in therapeutic environments, including the Soteria facility in Berlin which was designed for young people recovering from psychosis. 

Colour and space

“Therapeutic environments are increasingly recognised across healthcare and education – and colour definitely has a role to play,” says architect Jason Danziger, who’s been working with consultant psychiatrist Dr Martin Voss at St Hedwig’s Hospital since they built the Soteria Berlin in 2013. Currently they are creating a renewed Soteria facility on the campus, having trialled an award-winning prototype over the past decade.

“The Soteria is a therapeutic living environment for young people who have experienced a first episode of psychosis,” explains Danziger. “Treatment follows the principles of milieu therapy, which relies in part on offering patients safe, non-threatening environments.”

The design challenge was how to adapt a listed historic building to create a homely and engaging atmosphere. “The building dates from the turn of the last century and displays many of the characteristics of institutions of that era, including overly high ceilings and narrow rooms,” says Danziger. “Part of my goal is not to replicate systems that remind people they’re sick, and we worked with colour to help change people’s perceptions of the proportions of the space.”

A practice rooted in colour

Danziger’s practice is defined by user-centred, conceptually driven design with a focus on detailed colour planning and custom furnishings in spaces that support interaction, healing, play and learning. 

At the Soteria, Danziger has drafted a Bauhaus-inspired farbplan to distribute colour across the 12-bedroom facility in ways that reinforce individual identity and promote orientation of the self in space, as well as softening existing proportions. Each bedroom, for instance, features one wall of colour, with window reveals and accent surfaces in the same shade to help bounce colour around the room and provide variety inside the ward.

“The sky is always changing so the colours shift too, creating a reference for service users to track their day-to-day experiences against. Working with colour as an architect is really about working with light,” observes Danziger.

In the main living areas, a blue-grey ceiling set against a predominantly white field helps drop perception of the space’s height. Meanwhile, a neutral grey or green-grey tone based on research into the building’s historic interiors is used on most walls in both Soteria projects to create a datum that relates to body size, reflecting a more human-centred proportion. Danziger’s influences include Josep Lluís Sert and Bauhaus colour theorist Johannes Itten, whose work on the subjective experience of colour includes the idea that colour contrasts can create a sense of either distance or nearness.

Colour and emotion

“There’s no exact evidence base that I know of around specific colours and feelings but there are cultural norms that we can and should consider, like red means stop and green means go,” says Danziger. “A psychiatrist might call these environmental affordances and could say that a patient – even a very sick patient – might respond to them at a very low level. Painting a ward door red, for example, might deter people from entering. We can certainly put colour to work in architecture. In this case it means providing variety – balancing change and repetition for the building’s users.”

For the updated Soteria facility, Danziger has developed a new colour plan in reference to historic colours on the campus. Using the Swedish Natural Colour System (NCS)

  – a volumetric mapping of colours based on the phenomenology of human perception – the project palette responds in part to historic colours discovered in the Hospital’s ornately tiled hallways. 

As a way of communicating with project stakeholders about colour during the design process, the architect applied the palette to one wall to test how they would interact with one another and with natural light in situ. “Now it seems the mural will stay, so the new Soteria will incorporate a colour map of itself,” says Danziger.

To hear Jason Danziger talking about therapeutic atmospheres in mental healthcare click here. His projects – including the first Soteria Berlin – can be seen here .