For architect Stephen Parker ’11, design is deeply personal. Inspired by his Clemson Experience and his own family’s mental health journey, he belongs to a movement in health care architecture that puts compassion and dignity at the heart of every space.
Stephen Parker ’11 is an architect, but to discover his purpose, don’t ask about towering bridges or sprawling cityscapes. Ask about a door in a mental health facility.
“There are a lot of things that go into just the function of a door — respect, privacy, dignity — and give you a sense of control over what social interactions you want to have, or that you are forced to have,” he explains.
Parker is a certain kind of architect, a mental and behavioral health planner who focuses on designing health care facilities that see people in their most vulnerable states. His attention to detail reflects his education at Clemson University and experience as a design professional. But most of all, it’s personal.
Parker’s emotional connection to health care design began at birth, and its resonance grew over time. His namesake was a family member who died of a drug overdose. His godfather was a veteran, and several members of his extended family struggled with addiction and mental health challenges.
While life experiences gave him insight into how mental health impacts families, his education at Clemson began to reveal how the built environment shapes the people in it.
“It was a pivotal time to be a student,” he recalls.
Learning in Lee Hall
As a student, Parker threw himself into the Clemson chapter of the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS), serving as treasurer, vice president and president. In his leadership roles, he helped gather student feedback for both the architecture program’s accreditation and the design of Lee Hall III.
In one memorable activity, the AIAS chapter gave students postcards to provide feedback on the culture of Clemson’s architecture program.
“And so, they wrote anecdotes, they wrote stories, they drew out their experiences, they modeled things — and it was all anonymous,” Parker shares. Students ended up submitting 107 cards touching on 150 topics. Of the feedback, 14 percent was directly related to health issues, such as sleep, friendship, stress, eating, exercise and safety.
“It was about the sense of camaraderie that we had with one another. The pressure we felt in school. How our spaces impact their own mental health in terms of things like social density.”
The feedback was compiled into a book, which creates a candid account of the triumphs and struggles of his fellow students at the time. The comments range from inside jokes about recycling bins and X-Acto knives to warm references about friends and the “ArchiFamily” to painful anecdotes about sleep loss and stress.
“Concepts that I didn’t have the word for until later on in life,” Parker reflects.
Parker notes that the design of Lee III addressed many of the issues that students identified, creating both open learning environments and smaller spaces where students can socialize, interact one-on-one or take a moment to decompress. This experience opened Parker’s eyes to the power of environmental design. Realizing how Lee Hall shaped student interactions and well-being inspired his graduate thesis at the University of Maryland and, later, his work designing spaces for wounded service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Seeing my buddies returning from serving abroad — many with stories of combat trauma, PTSD and traumatic brain injuries — gave purpose to my graduate design work,” he explains. “Addressing gaps in the Military Health System for them and their families helped focus my design and advocacy.”
Throughout the work, he relied on skills he learned at Clemson: the ability to take his own experience, apply it to the built environment and translate it empathetically for people who can’t advocate for themselves.
After earning his architectural license, Parker became part of a team that developed the new Inpatient Mental Health Design Guide for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, influencing the design of the facilities serving more mental health patients than any other system in America. He was the youngest architect elected to the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Strategic Council, where he championed the mental health and architecture incubator.
“During December 2019, that was a topic not many were interested in addressing, but that changed substantially in spring of 2020, with the (COVID-19) pandemic acting as a catalyst for our advocacy efforts,” he explains. As more of the world was stuck inside, more people became aware of how the built environment impacted their mental health.
Supporting Architecture + Health at Clemson
Though Stephen Parker ’11 discovered his passion for health-focused design as an undergraduate, Clemson’s Architecture + Health graduate program carries forward that same mission. The nationally recognized concentration prepares students to explore how architecture influences physical, mental and social well-being.
Today, Parker advises and mentors students in the program as they design environments that foster dignity, recovery and connection, much like the spaces he creates in his own practice.
Design Hits Home
Then, in 2023, something happened that transformed Parker’s perspective in an even deeper way: The same week his son was born, one of his parents was admitted to a psychiatric facility.
A person whom he had loved and known his entire life became unrecognizable due to memory loss and delusional paranoia. Visits were limited to 15 minutes, during which he would try to get updates from his loved one, who had become an unreliable narrator.
“Not being able to remember taking medications is a big issue when your other diagnosis is delusional paranoia, and people forcing you to take pills is not helpful when they’re telling you, ‘It’s good for you.’ You don’t believe them because you see fictions that aren’t there,” he says. “So many families are going through similar experiences in their own unique ways.”
He also saw with his own family what he had learned through research: The tiniest details of a facility’s design can help or hinder someone in distress.
Details like doors.
“Many times, the door is the hardest element to design for,” Parker explains. He notes that when patients are checked into mental health facilities, their clothing and possessions are often taken from them.
“If you’re an individual who is very paranoid, you might have a lot of anxiety about not knowing where your belongings are or if they are secure.”
But even once possessions are returned, patients are housed in rooms they can’t always lock themselves. And the doors are opened constantly — at all hours — by staff checking on the patient’s condition. The locks click, the doors open and light spills in from the hallway, disrupting a patient’s sleep.
“That might be very triggering for someone with certain conditions or traumas,” Parker notes. This is the kind of problem for which he has a design solution.
“You put in a window with integral blinds that can be controlled from the inside and outside so the provider — and not other patients — can look in discreetly,” he says, “and the patient can also choose whether to look out or not.” He adds that giving patients an occupancy lock on bathrooms while staff have an override key is another measure that helps give people a sense of control and safety. Regulation of bedroom lights gives patients autonomy over when to fall asleep.
“If you give them choices, if you give them a voice in their treatments, then they are better able to get on the road to recovery because they feel like they can grasp what’s happening to them and they’re not simply receiving care passively — they are a partner in their care,” Parker says.
Every element of the treatment facility has a purpose. “You don’t want to design an environment that disrupts a patient from the key goal: their recovery.”
“If you give them choices, if you give them a voice in their treatments, then they are better able to get on the road to recovery because they feel like they can grasp what’s happening to them and they’re not simply receiving care passively — they are a partner in their care.”
–Stephen Parker ’11
From Passion to Purpose
While Parker has experience designing facilities for critical mental health scenarios, his projects incorporate wellness into the design for many types of clients around the world. Currently, he leads mental and behavioral health projects globally at Stantec, is an associate to the board for the U.K.-based Design in Mental Health Network, and was appointed to the International Union of Architects’ Public Health Group.
He has been part of the planning team for the Cleveland Clinic’s new 1-million-square-foot neurological institute, a community hospital in Kenya, sensory spaces for students, mental health units for Canada’s largest hospital, a recovery center in a remote Indigenous community near the Arctic Circle, and many more.
His work has earned him multiple awards, including the AIA Young Architects Award. He is also an active Clemson alumnus, frequently engaging with the Master of Architecture + Health program to advise on research and offer mentorship to students.
“I often tell students passion is a great place to start. But what motivates you?” Parker says. “Passion burns bright, but it can burn you out.
“But purpose … purpose can sustain you.”
John Eby is the public information director for the College of Architecture, Art and Construction and the College of Arts and Humanities.
Illustrations by Chris Koelle.
