How can a building help us heal? This is the question we asked ourselves in response to our studio’s site in the South Bronx. In an effort to directly address the neighborhood’s history of environmental neglect and healthcare insecurity, we proposed a mass-timber residential facility with an integrated, active wellness program intended to break down the barriers between residents and clinicians.

Distributed throughout the project’s two masses, these spaces act in concert with sets of exterior adjacent, multi-height atriums to optimize natural light, ventilation, and nature-access within each massings’ double loaded scheme. Unit types, ranging from micro-apartments to live-work duplexes, and co-living blocks, live within these punctuations and are proportioned to encourage and maintain a multi-generational community.

Wood as structure, finish, carbon sink, biophilic muse and climate panacea is the lynchpin in our sustainability through community approach–we believe building inclusive cities out of wood is an act of urban healing at a global scale.