UK architecture students build exhibit offering space for grief at Chandler Hospital

LEXINGTON, Ky. (April 7, 2026) –– University of Kentucky architecture students in the College of Design have created an art exhibit that they hope brings peace and comfort to visitors passing through the lobby of the University of Kentucky Albert B. Chandler Hospital.

As part of their final project for the fall semester, students built a wind phone for guests of the hospital to use. The wind phone originated in 2010 in Japan and is a symbolic installation meant to help people process grief and loss.

Wind phones are typically an old-fashioned, unplugged telephone placed in a quiet setting. It isn’t connected to anything — no wires, no signal. The purpose is to pick up the receiver and “call” someone you’ve lost, speaking words you never got to say.

Former UK faculty member Tony Roccanova and Leila Salisbury from the Kentucky Center for Grieving Children and Families approached the College of Design with an idea to create a wind phone. College of Design architecture associate professor Bruce Swetnam saw it as a perfect project for students in the college’s design-build certificate program.

“Leila came in and gave us a presentation on her story with grief and how a wind phone can be used as a tool for people going through difficult times,” said Peyton Ray, wind phone designer and senior in the College of Design. “I was touched hearing her story and really wanted to be part of this. As somebody who has lost a grandparent, I feel close to it.”

Salisbury works in the field of grief and loss, when she learned about the international presence of wind phones, she knew the Lexington community needed one.

“Grief is perhaps the most universal human experience, but it can be hard to talk about and even harder to find ways to attend to our feelings of loss, longing or regret around those people who are special to us,” Salisbury said. “Through a series of community connections, I got to know leaders in UK’s School of Architecture and UK’s Arts in Healthcare program, and the stars aligned. They all immediately understood the power of this concept and were so wonderfully supportive of making it happen at the university.”

Hospitals are often a place where grief, loss and life transitions are constant. Patients and families passing through UK Chandler Hospital will now have the wind phone offering a quiet, private space for reflection and release.

“The hospital setting is a place for the whole range of human experience, from the joy of a birth to the sad goodbye to a beloved person,” Salisbury said. “The wind phone is a safe and accessible way to process anything coming up for the visitors and staff.”

For the UK Arts in HealthCare program, the wind phone is a powerful addition that strengthens the program’s mission by enhancing the patient, family, visitor and staff experience through the arts and creativity.

“At a hospital specifically, it’s really important to have that outlet there to talk with someone who you’ve lost,” said Skyler Young, wind phone designer, a senior in the College of Design. “It’s important to process grief and work through it, and for some people that can be done through a physical phone to talk to their loved one directly. We realize it’s a disconnected phone, but it can be therapeutic to verbalize your feelings.”

Young and Ray worked together to make the wind phone come to life. The wind phone exhibit is sculptural, but it also embodies a lot of symbolism.

“The main structure of the wind phone consists of a cypress tree log,” Swetnam said. “This log has a lot of character but symbolically it’s the fallen body, the physical body. The other part is the human spirit represented in the maple wood slab. There is a blade of steel connecting the two and that represents the veil between life and death.”

The design centers around the idea that the people speaking are on the earthly side, where the physical body/cypress log is, with the phone sitting in a small opening cut through the steel partition, a representation of one’s words passing through the veil and connecting to the spirit on the other side.

Through the design-build certificate, the students were given a budget to execute the concept how they saw fit, deciding on materials and how best to bring the concept to life. For this assignment, incorporating sustainability was also top of mind for the designers.

Swetnam took the students to a warehouse on UK’s campus that had resources they could repurpose. While looking around the warehouse, the team’s short pit stop to sit on a large log they found became much more than just a place to rest their legs.

“We jokingly sat on it because we were tired and then thought, ‘Why don’t we consider this as a part of our design?’” Ray said.

The large cypress log would soon become the seating area for the wind phone installation. The log came to the warehouse as part of the UK Campus Woods program, which uses campus trees that die or are removed due to construction and gives new life through the products made from the wood by students in the classroom.

“Sustainability is really important to us as designers,” Young said. “Once we had the idea to use the log, we loved the life and death symbolism it represented. Using this resource also allowed us the chance to learn the skill of working with wood.”

Once they had gathered the bulk of their resources through UK’s warehouses and UK Campus Woods, the team created facade designs to send over to Salisbury and the UK Arts in HealthCare Program for approval. The final design was selected, and they got to work bringing the wind phone to life.

“That’s the really cool part of this design-build certificate is they’ve taken this piece of art and actually made it from the ground up,” Swetnam said. “They worked hard to move this massive log, which we got up on a trailer and had the whole studio help move it, and they also had to put the finishes on the logs. I’m very proud of their work on this project.”

Now seeing their finished project, all their hard work has paid off.

“So surreal,” Young said. “It’s like a fever dream; I can’t believe our creation is there ready to be used.”

It’s also an accomplishment for Swetnam to see his students take his teachings and excel as they apply what they’ve learned to the project.

“That’s what it’s all about,” Swetnam said. “I love teaching because we get to do stuff like this. It thrills me to see them as happy as they are with it all. To be able to teach the process of taking something from a concept all the way through a finished product is exactly what we should be doing as teachers.”

Located in the atrium lobby on the ground floor of Pavilion A at UK Chandler Hospital, the wind phone, known as “The Forest Stronghold,” is stationed and ready for use.

“We wanted our wind phone installation to go beyond the original concept of simply being a tool for grief and loss,” said Jason Akhtarekhavari, UK Arts in HealthCare Manager. “As the title suggests, we wanted to create a place of refuge that could be used for whatever purpose the individual who enters it needs. Not only did Peyton and Skyler create that refuge, but they designed and built a beautiful, functional and symbolic work of art that amplifies the power of the healing environment. This project exemplifies the excellence that can be achieved in collaboration with valued campus and community partners.”