Design To Enlighten Or To Drive You Crazy? Nendo's MD.net Clinic

If you aren't crazy when you enter this MD.net Clinic, you will be after you see the carpeting!  Far be it from me to express such a concern about the creation of a world class designer, but if this is the way psychiatry is headed, we crazies should head the other way.

MD.net Clinic Akasaka by Nendo: Photo: Jimmy Cohrssen ©Nendo

One might say that Japanese designer and architect, Nendo, was just following the wishes of his client, in this case a mental health clinic, one that handles the usual neurotics, depressives, obsessives, etcetera... plus counsels those just coming out of job 'retirement' to re-enter the work force, and does corporate consulting.

"Rather than getting patients back to a 'zero,' the neutral starting place of the traditional model for mental health care," Nendo writes, "the clinic aims to provide patients with something extra: a further richness in their daily lives that they did not have before starting treatment."

Nendo translates this richness into his design of the clinic's interior with doors that do not open...

MD.net Clinic Akasaka by Nendo: Photo: Jimmy Cohrssen ©Nendo

walls that do open...

MD.net Clinic Akasaka by Nendo: Photo: Jimmy Cohrssen ©Nendo

MD.net Clinic Akasaka by Nendo: Photo: Jimmy Cohrssen ©Nendo

doors that are windows...

MD.net Clinic Akasaka by Nendo: Photo: Jimmy Cohrssen ©Nendo

doors that turn the lights on and off...

 MD.net Clinic Akasaka by Nendo: Photo: Jimmy Cohrssen ©Nendo

and passages that are hidden by bookcases. 

MD.net Clinic Akasaka by Nendo: Photo: Jimmy Cohrssen ©Nendo

MD.net Clinic Akasaka by Nendo: Photo: Jimmy Cohrssen ©Nendo

These non-traditional (read weird) design elements will certainly give pause to anyone visiting the mental health facility, eliciting expressions of surprise, joy, bewilderment... Maybe some will even get the idea that the design is intended to encourage examination of their existing notions of the order of things.

MD.net Clinic is like a fun house, but maybe some patients will think they really are insane when they go there.  I think the carpet's the trigger here though; if they're not already crazy, the carpet is sure to make them go totally haywire!

Nendo