Avant-housing for the elderly
Most assisted-living residencies still do not look beyond the most fundamental of insitutional designs. Portuguese studio Aires Mateus Arquitectos has read the lifestyle needs and hopes of an elderly community, a kind of microcosm of society "with its own rules," and responded with a daring formalism that repositions the conventional boundaries of public and private.
The reduct mobility of those who will live in the building suggests that any
displacement should be an emotive and variable experience.
With a program that is meant to insure a measure of independence for its residents—who, although they contend with reduced mobility, also favor time outdoors—the exaggerated crenellations delineate individual living units. The variable expression of the structure reinforces the individuality of its inhabitants. At the same time, by not being aggregated into an anonymous, clinical whole, they retain privacy and options for solitude.
The project is based on a attentive reading of the life of a very specific
kind of community, a sort of a micro-society with its own rules.
The program is, somewhere in between a hotel and a hospital, that seeks to comprehend
and reinterpret the combination social/private, answering to the needs of a social life,
and at the same time of solitude.
The site also operates as a grand path that embraces the architecture. The long building hews to the contours of the site, a multivolume white wall emerging from the topography. Delimiting and defining the open space, this housing articulates a unique combination of the porous and the monumental.
Independents unities aggregate into a unique body, whose design is expressive and clear.
Source: domus.it
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