healing foundation

Land Designed for Wellbeing


The Task At Hand: The most underprivileged members of society face a nexus of interconnected issues including limited healthcare access, educational disparities, environmental challenges, housing insecurity, economic inequality and general loneliness. The Healing Foundation seeks to serve the most neglected by combining principles of integrative medicine with land development attuned to the needs and well-being of the people who inhabit it.

Village Homes teaches us that land can be used to achieve a common goal: 

• Village Homes in Davis California was a community of like minded families seeking to address social and environmental concerns raised in the ‘60s and ‘70s

• Though considered risky and untraditional at first, the project has become the most coveted housing in Davis and is now lauded by urban planners for its community focused design

• How can we design land according to our own values in order to best serve the wider community?

The Patterns of Land Design: 

• The Healing Foundation’s design revolves around primary patterns of land development from Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language that seek to combine the four major themes while addressing failures of existing institutions and communities to address societal problems

• These patterns are flexible and adaptable, but should ideally be implemented to as full an extent as possible

Integrated Work & Housing : 

• When residents, patients, and visitors all work on campus, the capitalist separation of work and family life is broken serving to close rifts in people’s emotional lives

  • Children can interact with men and women without one being away from the home for 8-10 hours

  • People can run home for lunch, and family can see family at work

  • Cultivating the land located on the campus, cooking meals, and teaching classes relating to sacred knowledge or any other skills which could be helpful to the campus residents. Any and all potential business can operate within these designed spaces (skilled labor, professionals offices, sale of goods, etc

• A person will put more effort into maintaining his home than anything else. When the home is integrated into the landscape with work, it creates an intimate ecology of home and work while infusing a lived in vitality of personal care.