Hasta La Ideas

This retirement home near Antwerp was designed by Belgian studio Areal Architecten around a pair of courtyards to avoid creating identical rooms along endless rows of corridors.

Areal Architecten wanted the Mayerhof Care Campus to be “a place to grow old with dignity”, rather than a sequence of characterless rooms.

“Such a scheme is a victory for the functionality of these buildings, but a defeat for the domesticity of it,” explained architect Jurgen Vandewalle.

The three-storey complex accommodates 148 residential units within a single building, which features a plan loosely based on a figure of eight. This allowed residences to be grouped into clusters around the two courtyards.

“Each room gets either a view towards these open spaces in the heart of the nursing home or to the green area around the building,” said Vandewalle.

The largest of the two courtyards is accessible to all residents, while a series of balconies and roof terraces provide accessible outdoor spaces on the upper levels.

Break-out spaces are dotted across all three floors to encourage residents to interact with their neighbours. There are also several common areas where they can dine or socialise together.

“Mayerhof Care Campus acts as a small town where functionality and domesticity merge into a fresh environment, and where social interaction, security and integration of people with different needs are in the centre,” added the architect.

The architect used a combination of timber and aluminium cladding to give the building its gridded facade. While the reflective metal provides horizontal stripes, the timber sections alternate with windows in between.

Areal Architecten has also completed three separate buildings on the site, which provide assisted living for up to 40 residents with disabilities. These structures feature masonry walls with exposed concrete beams.

Pathways run across the complex in different directions and three vehicular entrances lead into different car parking areas.

Photography is by Tim Van De Velde.

Read on for a project description by Areal Architecten:

Elderly Care Campus in Mortsel

Nursing homes and other social services are often interpreted according to the same pattern: countless rooms linked together by long corridors. Such a scheme is a victory for the functionality of these buildings, but a defeat for the domesticity of it. In care area Mayerhof the limits of this rational scheme are questioned, while space is created in which a community can grow. Various additions of communal and open areas add to the domesticity of the place.

By positioning the nursing home in a figure of eight on the site an infinite circulation that connects all the rooms on every floor with each other arises. In this functional diagram however, places where social interaction arises are inserted. At each corner of the figure open spaces create space for interaction. The linear corridor folds around two large voids, creating various perspectives and a sense of overview in the building.

As the program towards the upper floors is diminishing, terraces arise on every floor with an optimal orientation and protected from the wind. Each room gets either view towards these open spaces in the heart of the nursing home or to the green area around the building. The result is a very light volume that is bathed in natural light and space.

Besides nursing, three separate volumes provide assisted living, as stately sentinels overlooking the existing nursing home. Large openings with terraces located in a residential area that acts between the nursing home and the surrounding housing. All properties counting two or three facades allowing natural light to invade the living spaces are bundled with a widened corridor that houses the common functions.

The new buildings are implanted into the free space on the site around the existing nursing home, which remained in use during the works. After the demolition a green zone is liberated embraced by the new nursing home and assisted living residences. The joint residential area and the underground passage bind the different functions together. Otherwise they set themselves as autonomous parts, but live as integrated components of a unique residential care setting with a focus on lifelong living and care.

The choice for three entrances to the site, the construction of streets and indoor spaces and buildings that vary in size and appearance makes this new environment reminiscent of an urban fabric and is way different than the monotonous environments where such programs are mostly housed. The various functions dress in a different architecture. The nursing home is built in a reflective aluminium cladding used as canvas to the sunlight. The assisted living residences have a stately finish in masonry with exposed concrete ring beams.

Mayerhof Care Campus acts as a small town where functionality and domesticity merge into a fresh environment, and where social interaction, security and integration of people with different needs are in the centre. A community bound together by a rational structure, a place to grow old with dignity.

Client: Sint-Carolus Mayerhof vzw
Building cost: elderly care 148 beds – 12.600.000 euro, assisted living 40 units – 5.600.000 euro
Surface: elderly care 10.104 m² + assisted living 3884 m² + underground parking 1229m²
Structural engineering: ABT België nv
Technical studies: VK Engineering nv
Construction: MBG (CFE)

The post Areal Architecten’s Mayerhof retirement home
wraps around two courtyards appeared first on Dezeen.

Italian-Singaporean designers Lanzavecchia + Wai have designed a collection of aids for the elderly with styling that’s more domestic than medical.

Called No Country For Old Men, the series includes walking canes with integrated trays, iPad stands or baskets, a chair that’s easier to get out of thanks to a foot bar for tipping it forward and a lamp with a magnifying screen.

Materials like wood and marble integrate the pieces in a domestic interior where their standard counterparts can feel alien outside a clinical environment.

They presented the objects as part of Salone Satellite at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan last month.

Yves Behar recently collaborated with new brand Sabi to launch a range of medical aids to tackle the stigma of products normally associated with hospitals and nursing homes for a design-conscious ageing population. Read more in our earlier story.

See more about Lanzavecchia + Wai on Dezeen »

The Salone Internazionale del Mobile took place from 17 to 22 April. See all our stories about Milan 2012 here, plus photos on Facebook and Pinterest.

Photographs are by Davide Farabegoli.

Here’s some more information from the designers:

No Country for Old Men – A Collection of Domestic Objects for the Elderly

The No Country for Old Men collection: Together canes, MonoLight table lamps & Assunta chair

During the Milan Design Week 2012, Lanzavecchia + Wai, a creative studio of Francesca Lanzavecchia and Hunn Wai presented No Country for Old Men, a collection of domestic objects for the elderly.

To read, to get-up, to move yourself and your possessions around, at home; the project “No Country for Old Men” is a small family of objects that is not only attentive to the daily difficulties encountered by the elderly, but also how it can finally complement our domestic living spaces and acquired laziness.

Together Canes – T-Cane, U-Cane & I-Cane – walking aids for living, not just mobility.

The activity spheres that exist in a home become fluid and blurred with modern living habits and mobile devices. The T, U and I-canes not only provide interstitial support to the elderly, but also allow them and modern dwellers to bring along their tea-time, a collection of magazines and books and also to prop up their iPad for viewing from the sofa or typing out an email or document.

T-Cane – the cane designed for our grandmothers to keep on carrying the tea tray.

U-Cane – the container cane that can be a magazine holder, a knitting basket or…

I-Cane – the iPad cane for the Elderly 2.0.

The aging process brings about a natural decline in muscle tone and bone density that contributes to decreased mobility, stability, strength and endurance. Actions that are taken for granted can become more difficult with age. Simply standing up from a chair is difficult for some seniors due to muscle mass and strength losses. This is aggravated by our increasingly sedentary work-and-lifestyles.

Assunta assists by appropriating the user’s own body weight as leverage by stepping on the foot bar and as well as assures stability by having arm-rests that follow this tilting motion.

Informed by contemporary choices of material and expression, both aesthetical and functional, Assunta assumes its domestic role by assisting this common action of getting up from a chair as a considered and holistic product.

MonoLight Table Lamp – a lamp that illuminates & magnifies. Eye-sight deteriorates with age and long-hours in front of the computer screen.

MonoLight is a handsome table lamp with a magnifying screen and LED components housed in a CNC-machined aluminium enclosure, anchored to a dodecagon-profiled marble base, to enable various degrees of viewing angles.

The lamp comes in both portrait and landscape models to fit the reader’s viewing preference, and to change the angle, a simple gesture of tilting the aluminium frame whilst the heft of the marble piece keeps it in the desired position.

Resurrected dreams in emerging artist Jason Bard Yarmosky’s portraits

Rife with the painful vulnerability of reclaimed innocence, Jason Bard Yarmosky‘s painting series “Elder Kinder” reflects the parallel behaviors of growing up and growing old. Exhibiting at his first solo show (which opens this Friday at Brooklyn’s Like The Spice gallery), the works depict a cast of characters portrayed both in bold paintings and equally intriguing but more softhearted drawings. No matter the medium, meeting the direct stare of “Ballerina” or “Cowboy” is looking face to face with the raw sincerity of the subjects.

Yarmosky explains in detail, “Elder Kinder juxtaposes the young and old to push the limits of social norms and freedom of expression. As a child you learn to walk, but later in life you learn to un-walk—the raw freedom that is so much a part of youth gives way to borders and boundaries placed on adult behavior. But the dreams of the young, often sublimated by the years, never really disappear.”

Echoing the heroic themes of his earlier work, the models—Yarmosky’s Brooklyn grandparents—wrest their purest form of self from a lifetime of adult demands and responsibilities. His deft rendering of their worn faces is outdone only by their poignantly complex expressions.

Yarmosky’s work was shown this year at Aqua Art Fair in Miami, as well as Scope Art Fair—both concurrent with Art Basel. “Elder Kinder” opens at Like The Spice Gallery in 11 February 2011 and runs through 7 March 2011.

Technology and fine art collide in a device bringing museums to the elderly

A Texas-based project, For Love & Art helps the elderly living in hospices enjoy fine works of art during their last days through digital photos. A partnership between art galleries and museums brings thousands of pieces of fine art to Digital Foci‘s eight-inch high-resolution digital LCD notebooks for viewing by those who are no longer able to travel.

Already NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Washington D.C.’s The National Gallery of Art have joined the ranks of image contributors, but organizers are looking to expand the 1000-piece collection.

Dallas’ Touching Our World Foundation is asking for people to donate and spread this program to other hospices. As our population continues to gray, it’s important to think about art and design in the golden years whether it be a quirky paint-dipped cane or a sober assessment of design for future retirement complexes.