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explored how psychiatric hospital architecture could be reconceptualized through spatial, embodied, and affective experience. Rather than viewing buildings as neutral containers, van Leeuwen approached architecture as an active background that shaped how patients perceived, felt, and existed in the world.

Using a phenomenological lens, the research examined how built environments influenced corporeal communication, emotional attunement, and patients’ sense of being-in-the-world. This perspective opened new ways of understanding how design could support mental health beyond purely functional or clinical considerations.

A phenomenological approach

The study built on key theoretical frameworks, including Hermann Schmitz’s New Phenomenology and Thomas Fuchs’ phenomenological psychopathology. These perspectives emphasized lived, bodily experience and how environments could evoke feelings of expansion, constriction, or connection.

To investigate these ideas, van Leeuwen adopted a pluralistic qualitative methodology. This included historical analysis, spatial case studies, arts-based methods such as drawing and poetic writing, and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) of patient interviews. Together, these approaches allowed architectural atmospheres to be understood from multiple, complementary perspectives.

Learning from history and space

Van Leeuwen showed that psychiatric hospital design had evolved in cycles rather than along a straight line of progress. Shifts in medical theories, social conditions, and architectural movements had continuously reshaped how these spaces were conceived.

Detailed case studies revealed how architectural elements—such as spatial layout, materiality, and sensory qualities—created distinct atmospheric experiences. Drawing on phenomenological concepts, the research demonstrated how environments could invite different ways of feeling and interacting, shaping patients’ emotional and bodily responses.

Exploring experience through creative methods

Arts-based methods played a crucial role in capturing dimensions of experience that were difficult to express through conventional analysis. Drawing helped integrate spatial and sensory information into an embodied understanding of place, while poetic writing allowed engagement with ephemeral, affective, and relational aspects of atmosphere.

Van Leeuwen showed how these methods complemented more traditional research approaches, offering deeper insight into how architecture was experienced at a sensory and emotional level.

Architecture and mental health

By integrating phenomenological insights into conditions such as depression, mania, and psychosis, van Leeuwen examined how architecture could support disrupted patterns of experience.

The findings suggested that design could foster:

• Expansion and renewed engagement in depressive states
• Calm and containment in manic conditions
• Stability and coherence in experiences of psychosis

From this, three key design principles emerged: multisensory coherence, environments that supported rhythm and action, and diverse atmospheric qualities that allowed for both engagement and retreat.

Toward a new design perspective

Patient interviews highlighted that the atmosphere of psychiatric hospitals was shaped not only by physical space but also by routines, social relationships, and sensory experiences. Architecture acted as a mediating and modulating element rather than a direct therapeutic tool.

Van Leeuwen ultimately called for a shift in how psychiatric hospitals are designed. Instead of prescriptive, one-size-fits-all solutions, the research advocated for approaches that prioritized embodied experience and atmospheric attunement—supporting patients in reconnecting with their environment and themselves.

Title of PhD thesis: Supervisors: Bernard Colenbrander, Cor Wagenaar and Ralph Brodrück