Short Circuits

The proposed design is for a health care facility to treat and observe sufferers of dementia and has been informed and developed through the four preceding exercises.
Exercise One laid the groundwork for the importance architecture plays in a healthy society and the pain that poor architecture can inflict, physically and emotionally.
Exercise Two identified opportunities of the site that could relate to a health care facility and helped confirm a dementia treatment facility as particularly suitable:
The site exhibits evidence of its past, the building up and layering of materials and textures, and the wearing and erosion around the exhaust stack. A balance is achieved between the degradation of the site and its renewal through maintenance and produces a visible trace of time and layering. This balance presents the passerby with instances where the site can be understood as having a memory or being a record of activity.
This record of activity has given the site its own vernacular that can be extended to influence the development of the health care facility. The role of memory to the dementia sufferer is a critical consideration in the health facility’s design and there is an important link between the mind, the body and architecture. Memory is made stronger by strong experiences. The spatial experience of architecture is a major contributor, from the ability of landmarks to improve path finding to the decorum of a building serving to reference ideas or activities that take place within.
Exercise 3 strengthened the ideas of isolation and layered story-telling but also introduced community activities and personal experiences of the site. The visual linking between apparently isolated activities on site is another important consideration for the treatment of dementia and gave rise to the communal participation as opposed to individual linear goals.
Exercise 4 is an attempt to incorporate all these ideas of the site with the needs of a dementia treatment facility to produce a design that belongs to the site and enriches the community.
The approach of the proposed design is to encourage independent decisions among sufferers but to facilitate this independence through community involvement. The innovation for dementia treatment is the constant testing carried out in scenarios where life skills are developed and improved through everyday activities. The separation between activities to ‘keep the mind active’ and general life skills is no longer evident. The advantages of mind exercises such as scrabble, in that they can be easily monitored and engaged in, is carried over to path-finding and other activities where the technology of simulation and circulation testing can be gauged and measured to personalize the experience for each patient to produce a complex and diverse system of communal individuality where each patient has access to their own sense of belonging and their own connection with the past, but connections that are made richer by their interactions with the broader community.