Nursing Home

We designed a nursing home, housing 90 inhabitants in single rooms set on a beautiful location, overlooking mountains and greenery. We designed a residential building, a real home for the elderly. We wanted the house to be as intimate as a private house and as diverse as a town.

1. The building is extroverted in order to fit the small plot take advantage of the beautiful exterior. We preserved some exterior space: an entrance square on the northern and a garden on the southern side of the building.
2. We organized the rooms into nine groups that function as three units in the night time. The structure is that of a three-leaf clover. Playful relations between spaces and living quarters that connect them are a typological innovation.
3. Each cluster of ten rooms is organized into a separate apartment: there is an entrance, hall area, circular corridor and a dining room with a terrace. We avoided dead end corridors, as they are not simulative for the inhabitant especially patient with dementia. The living quarters – the dining room open to both sides: towards the covered terrace on the southern side and towards the view towards the mountains on the northern side.
4. Two room modules are placed into orthogonal grid shaping the perimeter of the building. Between the modules, there are spatial intervals that bring the light into the central space. The niches and protrusions in the building create a sense of scale that allows intimacy of interior spaces despite the large number of units.