This project is a small living and teaching campus for children with autism in Harris, New York. With this project we attempted to make an architecture which is nurturing and sympathetic to the particular needs of children with autism. Working closely with dedicated administrators, we learned a great deal about the needs of the autistic and created the buildings accordingly. As the design was experimental and groundbreaking, only time will tell whether we have hit the mark.

The administrators stressed the issue of ‘transitional’ space again and again as a key to the autistic spatial sensibility. People with autism do not like sudden spatial juxtapositions, or large undifferentiated spaces such as one would find at a shopping mall. The careful choreography of spatial conditions as they unfold as the body moves through them is a critical aspect of designing for people with autism.

The buildings are sited across a gently rolling topography of beautiful deciduous woodland. The overwhelming impression of the buildings is that they are forms designed in sympathy with the landscape, swerving and slipping past trees, flexing and bending to conform to the curvature of the topographic contours. From the main paths one picks up the gently bending walls which lead both the eye and the body into the compound, and finally, to each of the entryways of the buildings.