Architectural Competitions for Care and Caregivning

This article will discuss architecture and architectural competitions that are related to ageing populations in modern welfare societies. The emphasis lies on the need for new buildings for care and caregiving. The realization of these buildings demonstrates beliefs and notions about the appropriate interaction between the human being and architectural space for the senior segment of the population. Architecture for residential care homes organizes space around individual and collective life stories, which evolve in private zones and in communal space for dining and socializing. It is our hope that this article will encourage reflection so that the architectural profession and potential organizers of architectural competitions will explore the capacity for architecture to improve the quality of everyday life for those whose self-image has been changed by age and who experience an increasing need for care and caregiving. In the quest for such architecture, architectural competitions provide a professional laboratory for innovation and spatial experiments (Rönn, Andersson & Kazemian, 2011). The article is divided into three parts. We begin by giving an overview of international research on architecture for care and caregiving. The relationship between human beings, the ageing process and the spatial design is addressed. Conclusions on this interaction, formulated by three researchers in architecture, will be discussed. These are the American researcher Victor Regnier, Professor at the School of Architecture, University of Southern California; Philippe Dehan, a teacher at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture in Paris-La Villette, France; and Benyamin Schwarz, Professor at the Department for Architectural Studies at the University of Missouri, US. The second part of the article will present Nordic architectural competitions that have focused on buildings for care and caregiving. A significant feature of these competitions is a certain conflict that can be perceived to exist between austere institutional design and fragile homelike qualities. In the final part of the text, we will analyse the representation of people, architecture, nature, climate, technologies and activities that can be found in competition proposals. We will look at four proposals to an invited competition for a residential care home in the municipality of Linköping, Sweden. The competition was part of a Swedish governmental programme called Growing Older – Living Well (Bo bra på äldre dar) and in the following termed GOLW, 2010- 2012. The programme aimed at innovating and developing creative housing solutions for the senior Swedish population (Andersson & Rönn, 2014). The competition proposals provide informative insights into Swedish architects’ ideas for the ageing welfare state.QC 20160817