Laloux’s Refuge is an unorthodox adolescent psychiatric centre which focuses on rehabilitating patients with methods orientated around a rewiring of posture and body trauma. It also re-instigates patients’ curiosity by utilising motifs from both René Laloux’s film universe and classic fairy tales. The building is dedicated to the French animator and film director, René Laloux, and his experimental film La Planète Sauvage. The building draws inspiration from Laloux’s early career, involving the patients at the psychiatric clinic in film and animation classes as a means of creative therapy.

The design of Laloux’s Refuge adheres to themes of posture and puppetry; a symbiotic relationship is created within the Refuge whereby the building puppets the patients and the patients puppet the building. This is exemplified by the pneumatic tower, which periodically inflates each morning, mimicking the posture of the patients within. Using the analysis of Mandelbulb formations and applying them to fairy tale motifs, Laloux’s Refuge uses scale to subliminally enforce a sense of spatial comfort through understandings of attention and perspective. This spatial design assists the psychiatrists in rewiring the adolescent patients and eventually healing their trauma.