Patients with ocd suffer from obsessions and compulsions – compulsions are physical tics of the body, which occur once the patient is exposed to an anxiety inducing environment, whereas obsessions are mental fears that if they do not fulfill these tics, something bad will happen to them or their loved ones.
After the first stages of research, I designed a body prosthetic – focusing on the movements of the hands, I created a diptych of the two extremes – one, which prevents the patients from fulfilling their tics by locking up the joints once a movement is completed, and the other that through constant tension bores the patient of their symptoms.

Depicting the possible movements of the patient's hands while wearing the prosthetics.

The leading treatment for OCD is exposure therapy, where the patients are exposed to anxiety inducing environments, in order for them to reclassify these chaotic elements as normal.
The question I started dealing with is whether or not it’s possible to cure OCD. Because it’s a purely mental condition, and despite extensive research into treatment programs, there has not been a clear cure so far. So instead of designing a hospital for OCD, I propose a design for a reintegration center, which helps its patients to reintegrate into society through exposure therapy.
Inspired by both the panopticon following typological research of prisons, as well as the purity and OCD-ness of its shape, the centre is a series of spheres positioned in Piccadilly Circus – each one dealing with patients with different severities of OCD.

The first stage of reintegration into society, meant for patients with extremely severe OCD, only exposes its patients to anxiety on a domestic scale. The patient enters the space and is assigned a room, but as he moves throughout the spaces, he is assigned to live with another patient, and carry on until they all live together in a dorm.
The spaces are otherwise OCD friendly – all the corners are rounded, the internal walls illuminated, and the walls have specially designed sinks for the patients to use. There is no direct view of the Circus, so the walls have a gradient of opaque to transparent in order to supply them with daylight while simultaneously obstructing their views of Piccadilly Circus.

The second circle focuses on exposing the patients to external environment in order to reintegrate them back into outside life.
The space is divided into two categories – the internal exposures, and the external – the internal expose the patients to office life in order to prepare them for potential job opportunities, while the external expose them to amplified elements of the environment – with 6 exposure points, the patients experience all from loud sounds, polluted air, flashing imagery etc. This was also the focus of my TS, where I instead of replicating these conditions, I decided to utilize my site and amplify the existing elements of chaos from down below.
The metal façade, for instance, attracts dust particles when its attached to a van de graaf generator – exposing the patients to filth.

The third circle’s function is two-fold. One of its functions is to provide the patients with a moment of clarity in an otherwise hectic environment with the use of repetition – utilizing & replicating elements of the environment, I break the fabric of Piccadilly Circus. This, however, with its severe intervention, simultaneously becomes a critique of how OCD patients are treated in nowadays society. So instead of constantly trying to cure the patient, I start to cure the environment and make it more OCD-friendly.
Each of the different colonnades reflects the building it cuts through.

I decided to continue with this idea of cleaning the environment – I developed another, fourth circle, which taps into the underground system – allowing the commuters of Piccadilly underground to access the platforms from a wider radius around the Circus, it cleans the space of its abundance of people.
Because I wished to assign a program to this circle, I turned it into a tourist attraction, hopefully shifting the population of tourists from above to below ground.
Finally, this project gradually shifts from being a reintegration center for patients with OCD into an intervention cleaning the environment to make it more OCD-friendly, and consequently clean the society itself.

Cutting through the intervention and the site, I started looking at how both internal as well as external spaces react to the reintegration centre and its patients.