Sensory Rooms as Emotional Infrastructure

During our Advanced Studio on baseball stadiums, we discovered a small yet revealing space—the Sensory Room—a private refuge for emotional decompression within the most public architectures. These rooms, now appearing in stadiums, airports, and museums, show that architecture must address not only physical needs but also psychological ones.

I began to realize that emotional well-being should be treated as a public right—designed, regulated, and spatially recognized like restrooms. In that case, buildings such as Rudolph Hall could integrate such rooms to pause and reset—spaces of softness, light, and tactility that acknowledge vulnerability as part of collective life rather than something to be hidden. After all, even in the most public architectures, we still need a place to be alone with ourselves—a quiet space.