Confluence: A Space for Group Therapeutic Work

Inspired by "Vase" (1897–1900) by George E. Ohl This project began with a vessel whose form and glaze felt strikingly ahead of its time. Its rounded body folds and erupts in turbulent cobalt and wine dark drips, the other calm and softly rose colored. That collision of chaos and stillness on a single surface was the spark.

My first instinct was to translate the piece literally into furniture. After exploring several forms, I arrived at a modular sofa that carried the vessel's split silhouette and rough glaze texture, a piece I loved, but one that felt more like a beautiful object than something with real purpose. The question became how this form could hold not just a body, but a process.

The vessel's palette pointed the way. Its violets and deep blues read as storm, as unresolved feeling. Its blush pink read as calm and clarity. That duality became the emotional architecture of a room, not simply a space to walk through, but a container: a structure designed to hold and support the internal work a person or group does within it.

The design borrows its layout directly from the piece's cleft mouth. Two separate entrances, one for each side of the group, are both rendered in the vessel's darker, turbulent glaze, corridors meant to be walked slowly, carrying in whatever a person brings before the work even begins. These two paths converge into a wide zone of awareness, the room's core, a space that holds the group as they confront and work through what surfaces, together. From there, the space narrows into a smaller, rose toned room of calm, for quiet integration once the work has settled. Finally, a single exit, distinct from the two entrances and opening outward rather than closing inward, lets the group leave carrying what they came with, but changed.

The room's journey mirrors the vessel's own gesture: two turbulent openings that fold into one, and, ultimately, release. The architecture doesn't just frame the therapeutic process, it holds it. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/20357