IN MEMORY - a home for my father

IN MEMORY A house for my father - senior residence Life starts and life ends. When we are young we tend to forget about the way we needed our parents when we were very small, about how we will also need care when as we get old. Why do elderly people have to ‘live’ in unadapted nursing homes, when they can’t or don’t want to live with their family. Why can’t we combine medical care with community living, with commodities, with proper gardens and outdoor spaces? These unadapted nursing homes, more hospital like than homes, tend to enhance elderly people’s sense of loneliness, lack of friends, lack of life. This project, designed in memory of a great Man, that unfortunately died in one of the unadapted and sad Portuguese nursing homes aims to combine age and life. To manage a new way of designing and thinking architecture for the elderly, taking out the feel of pure medical care and upbringing the sense of home. His name was Mario, we lived in Madeira and we lived a long and happy life! His dream was to make universities for the elderly! Ours is to show that it is possible to design a home for him. A building that can be combined with sequences of the same footprint to create community patios. To create neighborhoods A building that is designed with flowing ramps and no edges, where the elderly can touch the walls, feel the warmth of the sun and hear the sound of the rain. Spaces where friends can gather, play cards, eat, plant. Rooms that have outdoor spaces for the old ladies to plant their own flowers and to watch them grow. Patios that have grass and trees and playgrounds for the grandchildren to visit and understand how important life is, how important it is to spend time with your old, sometimes ill, loved ones in a qualified environment. Spaces where generations can melt and learn from each other, a building that understand how important it would have been for Mario to see his grandsons running around for five minutes. How much happiness that would have given him. Common areas where he could have danced with his friends. On the whole, getting old is part of life, not having qualified spaces for the elderly is a choice. This project aims to prove that that choice is wrong and that the future is to combine medical assistance and the basics of architecture and life. Located in an existing plot adjacent to a ‘tradicional’ nursing home in Funchal, Madeira, the concept is to raise the building above ground floor levels, with rounded functional cores that provide facilities and vertical access, where the ground floor is invaded by the gardens around and the boundaries between interior and exterior are blurred. The top floors host both rooms and medical care parts, almost hoovering above ground, with projecting green balconies for each of the users to have their own garden. The roof top is a vegetable garden, where the elderly can plant their own vegetables and fruits or calmly read a book under the warm Madeira sun.