Living Knowhere: Research and design on dementia and architecture

Due to our aging population, numbers of people with dementia are constantly increasing, while both the cause and cure are still unknown. At the end of a lifetime, after all a person has been through, it is hard to let go. It is hard to let go on home, on memories, on one self. Due to the disease, many things become insecure and one’s life falls apart. Moreover, being diagnosed any kind of dementia within our hyper-cognitive society, which values and requires fast adaptation and constant learning, often means being excluded from the society’s center not only economically and socially, but also literally by means of being moved from home into a special care unit, dependent on help of others. With no way back and no other place to go, many people spend last years of their lives in such situation. With dementia progressing, life outside of the caring home becomes more demanding and peoples’ life sphere gradually shrinks. At a certain point, it shrinks in between walls of the care unit only and continues till the point where it becomes the person himself and his immediate bodily surroundings. In the late stage of dementia, one single room becomes the whole world which tells us how extremely important the direct environment is, as it may contain the whole life of a person at each moment here and now. With so many abilities and certainties slipping away, support from the environment is enormously important as it can be one of the last thing demented people can relate to. How can such a sensitive, unconditioned support be achieved?Explore labArchitectureArchitecture and The Built Environmen