structural solutions, with reinforced concrete cores. Materials used included local volcanic stone, pinewood and clay. The project reframes architecture not as an object, but as ecological and cultural infrastructure. More than 250,000 native plants were propagated and planted,
extending the park’s habitats and creating a research site that informs regional reforestation strategies. Since the Fossey Fund campus opening, 52 bird species, small mammals and endemic amphibians have returned, and 95 percent of the plants that were planted are intact.
Toward an Architecture of Care
Across all of this work, one lesson has remained constant: dignity is not an outcome. It is a practice. It must be chosen again and again — in the questions we ask, the partnerships we build, and the systems we challenge. To truly support collective wellbeing, we must move toward a healing-centered approach — one that recognizes people as more than the worst thing that has happened to them and designs for health, joy, and possibility.
This shift demands more than new tools or frameworks. It requires reckoning with the histories and power structures embedded in the
built environment itself. Architecture does not exist outside systems shaped by racism, extraction, and exclusion. If we fail to confront
that reality, we risk treating symptoms while leaving underlying harms intact.
To center healing, designers must engage earlier, stay on the project longer, and work more collaboratively. We must accompany communities beyond construction and remain accountable to the lives our spaces shape. And we must refuse the comfort of “good enoughˮ when so much is at stake.
This is the work of MASS: designing with dignity, practicing accompaniment, and seeking abundance. It is work rooted in care — and it is work we can only do together.
To learn more about MASS, or view many of its videos, please click here:
https://modelofarchitecture.org/
Across all of this work, one lesson has remained constant: dignity is not an outcome. It is a practice. It must be chosen again and again — in the questions we ask, the partnerships we build, and the systems we challenge. To truly support collective wellbeing, we must move toward a healing-centered approach — one that recognizes people as more than the worst thing that has happened to them and designs for health, joy, and possibility.
Patricia Gruits
Co-Executive Director
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