Spaces of hospitality are a mirror to how different cultures articulate generosity, care, belonging, and identity. In busy city settings, this is reflected in hotels, service systems, and curated amenities that directly shape the visitor experience. These spaces translate care into measurable forms, where success is correlated with efficiency, luxury, and brand identity.

In rural America, hospitality operates with a different logic. In these environments, care is grounded in labor and community, while directly responding to the specific ecological and cultural geographies. Distance, limited infrastructure, and close social networks demand forms of architecture that are flexible and self-sufficient. Designs respond to shifting weather, local materials, and a culture where support often begins with neighbors. In this landscape, architectural thresholds of hospitality emerge in responsive, yet unexpected, ways.

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Just like hospitals and medical offices, dental clinics are places that tend to bring anxiety and anguish to patients, reactions that can be intensified in an unfriendly and unwelcoming environment. White and neutral environments can bring the notion of asepsis and hygiene, essential requirements for hospital architecture. However, the lack of welcoming elements, such as the use of warmer colors and materials, may also be responsible for causing a certain distance between professionals and patients, in addition to reinforcing the stereotypes attributed to dental clinics.

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This article was originally published on Metropolismag.com.

The renowned founder of his eponymous studio—which joined Perkins and Will in 2014—passed away July 9th, leaving a major legacy of built works, community engagement, and advocacy within architecture.

In 2016, as the three-tiered, bronze-skinned, and filigreed National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) opened on the National Mall—a signature building of the Obama era—one of its main architects, Durham, North Carolina–based Phil Freelon, was diagnosed with the neurodegenerative disease ALS. Earlier this week, Freelon died of complications from the disease. He left behind a four-decade legacy of considered, attentive design for communities typically ignored—or worse, harmed—by processes forming the built environment.

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