Writing on solitude, focus, and the spaces we work in.

In 2016, Steven Holl Architects completed a roughly 85-square-metre (918-square-foot) guest house and artist's studio on 28 acres of forest in Rhinebeck, New York. The land had originally been zoned for five suburban plots. The firm built one small house instead and left the rest of the woods standing.

The house isn't built up so much as carved out. Three spherical voids are cut through a single compressed volume — one opens into an entrance hall, one into a skylight over the living room, one into a curved window seat that looks straight into the trees. In one widely circulated image from the project, someone sits alone in that seat with a book, forest pressing close on both sides of the glass.

Nobody programmed a "reading room" into this house. Someone cut a circle out of a wall and pointed it at the forest. That's closer to how we think about solitude in a building — it rarely needs its own square footage. It needs one opening, placed well.

In 2019, Francis Kéré completed Xylem, a pavilion of about 200 square metres for the Tippet Rise Art Center in Fishtail, Montana — an open canopy of stacked pine logs on steel columns, set in a clearing near Grove Creek. The form is drawn from the toguna, a traditional gathering shelter from the Dogon villages of Kéré's native Burkina Faso.

What makes Xylem worth mentioning here isn't the material or the geometry — it's the brief. Kéré's own studio describes it as a place where visitors can gather and talk, or sit and meditate in solitude, inside the same roof, at the same time, with no wall built between the two.

That's the whole Solitary Spaces argument in one structure. You don't need a separate building for the people who want to talk and the people who want to think. You need one room honest enough to hold both, and let people choose their own distance from the center.

MAPA, the Uruguay- and Brazil-based studio, completed Minimod Curucaca in the Curucaca Valley of southern Brazil — a roughly 90-square-metre prefabricated house, built off-site and trucked nearly 900 kilometres to a clearing in the Atlantic forest. The walls are black cross-laminated timber; the roof is grassed over.

Seen from above, the building nearly vanishes — that's the point. MAPA describes it as a primitive retreat reinterpreted for the present, one meant to turn its own surroundings into what the studio calls "available landscape," rather than compete with them.

Most buildings that want to feel solitary reach for scale or distance — a long drive, a big site, a wall. Minimod does it with camouflage instead. It's a reminder that solitude-first architecture doesn't have to be large, expensive, or bespoke.

Researchers at MIT's Senseable City Lab used AI to compare footage of four public spaces in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia — 1980s film shot by the urbanist William Whyte, against video of the same spots today. Between 1980 and 2010, walking speed rose 15 per cent. The number of people stopping to linger fell by 14 per cent.

The study, published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doesn't blame any one cause — researchers point to gentrification, rising affluence, and phones, which have made it easy to skip the wait for a friend at a public landmark altogether. Project lead Carlo Ratti put it plainly: these spaces are working "more as a thoroughfare and less a space of encounter."

We'd add one more reading of the data. A place people no longer linger in isn't a place people have stopped needing — it's a place that stopped inviting them to stay. And lingering has to go somewhere. For a lot of people, it goes into a phone, mid-stride, which isn't rest.

A 2025 study out of the University of Surrey followed a group of primary-school-aged children and found that the ones who felt things more deeply — the highly sensitive ones — were also better at recognizing emotion in others and navigating conflict. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant shared it with his followers with a line that's stuck with us: "sensitivity is not a flaw — it's a feature."

It's a small study, and it measures children, not architecture. But it lines up with the same correction we recently made to our own numbers: highly sensitive people aren't rare or broken. They're a real, measurable share of any group.

Most workplaces are still built on the opposite assumption — that sensitivity is a liability to manage around, not a capacity to design for. A quiet room isn't a concession to someone who's struggling. It might be where your most emotionally intelligent people do their best thinking.

No architect designed this one. It's a reader's own armchair, pulled up against a wall of books, posted with a caption about habit, Sunday rain, and a to-be-read pile that never runs out.

We're including it here on purpose. Most of what we write about is buildings — zones, materials, floor plans. But the actual need behind all of it is smaller and older than any of that: one chair, positioned so the rest of the room falls away. Someone built this corner for themselves, out of furniture they already owned, in a house no architect ever touched.

That's the real test of a solitude-first space, and it applies at any scale — not whether it was designed by someone credentialed, but whether a person, given the choice, keeps coming back to sit in it.

In 1984, Mexican architect Javier Senosiain completed Casa Orgánica outside Mexico City — a home shaped like a peanut shell and buried almost entirely under a green dune, so that from the outside, all you see is grass and trees. The plan is two large oval rooms joined by a low, narrow passage: one for the household to gather in, one for sleeping. Senosiain has described them simply as day and night.

What we keep coming back to is that division. Not a wall between social and solitary, but a passage — a physical transition you walk through to go from one mode to the other. You don't get thrown between them. You're moved.

Most buildings don't bother making that walk deliberate. A meeting room and a quiet room sit off the same corridor, behind the same kind of door. Casa Orgánica treats the shift itself as part of the architecture.

@zenform's caption calls the backyard "the most underestimated space in residential design" — sitting just beyond the back door, treated by most people as an afterthought. Their case: layer it the way a well-designed interior gets layered — planting, timber decking, stone, water, fire — and it stops being leftover space and starts being a room.

One line does a lot of work: a backyard designed with care gives you "a place to sit outside in the morning, to eat in the evening, to exist briefly without walls around you" — and that, they argue, isn't a luxury. It's a necessity most homes already have and haven't unlocked.

One slide in the post is just a photo of a willow tree, with a caption underneath: someone planted it in their own backyard specifically so they'd have somewhere to read and journal under it. No architect, no brief. Just a person who noticed what they needed and grew it.

Dr. Nicole LePera, a clinical psychologist who posts as @the.holistic.psychologist to an audience of several million, published a carousel making a plain clinical case for solitude: the nervous system needs stillness, and most of us were never taught to recognize when it's asking for it. Her five signs — irritability, unexplained physical pain, avoiding calls and texts, an inability to sit still, disproportionate anger — read less like a self-help list and more like a diagnostic one.

The sharper point comes later in the post: solitude is stigmatized. It gets read as depressing, or as something people only do when nobody else is available. Her argument is the opposite — a regular, needed return to what she calls homeostasis, not a symptom of anything.

What's notable is where this went in the comments. Not questions, not skepticism — just a wave of people asking to be put on a waitlist, and one comment that admitted, half-joking, to needing five to seven hours of alone time a day.

For years, Kleon worked in spare bedrooms, garages, attics, lofts — and admits almost nothing beat the kitchen table. But there's a wife involved, and a marriage he wants to keep, so eventually the mess needed its own room. In 2022, after a year of planning and a 14-month build, he finished a poolside studio in his backyard: a box of about 200 square feet, windows on three sides, most of them facing north for the light.

His brief for the room, in his own words, was oddly specific: "I like high ceilings but not too big of a footprint... tucked in and surrounded by my stuff. Sort of like a cockpit in an airplane." Right under a window with a view, but small enough to feel held rather than exposed.

The best detail isn't architectural. During framing, before the insulation and drywall went in, he and his kids grabbed sharpies and drew all over the exposed paneling — knowing it would all get sealed over and disappear into the walls. The room holds that now, whether anyone remembers it's there or not.