Ellie Harding of London School of Architecture finds a way for people living with Alzheimer’s disease to stay close to their families while prolonging their independence
Ellie Harding
Nobody Wants to Live in a Care Home
London School of Architecture
Tutors: Fabrizio Matillana, Kit Sitby-Harris
There has to be a better way to approach it,’ says Ellie Harding of the accommodation options available for people living with Alzheimer’s disease, especially those with early onset-Alzheimer’s.
Her Silver medal-winning project presents an alternative to those either struggling with an ill-suited home, or living in a care home isolated from friends and family. This innovative concept enables people living with Alzheimer’s disease to remain living with their families in a development at the heart of the community, and in doing so, prolong their independence.
‘Alzheimer’s disease cannot be cured by architecture, but the quality of spaces, their layout, forms, materials and locations can have a huge impact on the severity of symptoms and consequent distress. Crucially, spatial perception has been shown to be altered even in the very early stages of the disease,’ she says.
Harding was keen to go further than ‘tick-box’ designing for dementia guides. Instead, her design draws on research into the different way that people living with Alzheimer’s disease experience space. This is by egocentric perception based on what is experienced at a single moment, resulting in a greater reliance on lines of sight, materiality and colour for spatial navigation. This contrasts with the allocentric perception used by those without Alzheimer’s disease, in which egocentric perception is used to form a bird’s eye cognitive map of the space.
For the project, she used a cloud mapping photogrammetry technique to create egocentric maps of how people living with Alzheimer’s disease experience particular routes, and used these findings to inform the design and ameliorate the effects of the disease.
Her site is in London’s Crouch End next to Hornsey Town Hall in the centre of the community – a sharp contrast to the edge-of-bypass locations common to many care homes. She proposes 29 housing units and two porters’ lodges grouped around a ‘landscape of yards’. In the homes the design is ‘route and visual access-based’ with the bathroom at its heart. The landscape has one clear route with distinctive areas to aid familiarity and navigation. Particular attention is paid to materials and the haptic qualities of elements such as door handles. A safe, porous boundary with passive controls at the porters’ lodges is designed to enable those with sufficient allocentric perception to come and go.
She proposes that egocentric mapping could also be used more widely to ‘test’ designs before construction to ensure they are compatible for people living with Alzheimer’s disease.
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Mina Hasman (chair) Sustainability director & climate advocacy lead at SOM, UK
Shawn Adams Architect, writer, and lecturer; co-founder of the POor Collective, UK
Nana Biamah-Ofosu Architect, researcher, and writer; director at YAA Projects; lecturer in architecture at Kingston University, UK
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