PROJECT AND LOCATION: Dementia Care Center, Rohini, Delhi

TOPIC: Age and dementia-sensitive architecture

HYPOTHESIS: Reducing Spatial Disorientation in Dementia Care Center can treat dementia.
OBJECTIVES

.To study the relation between architecture and dementia

.To study which building and design components of architecture are able to support an independent life
and an optimal provision of care for dementia affected people.

.To study the quality of life of people in existing residential care homes in relation to building design
features.

Case Studies Identified:

1 . De Hogeweyk Dementia Village (Literature)

2 . Alzheimer’s Respite Center, Dublin (Literature)

3 . Santa Rita Geriatric Center (Literature)

4 . Jagruti Rehabilitation Center, Pune (Live)

5 . Dignity Day Care Center, Mumbai (Live)

De Hogeweyk Dementia Village

Located close to Amsterdam, 'De Hogeweyk' is a village-style neighbourhood for elderly residents with
dementia, offering maximum mobility and an opportunity to lead a normal and active daily life. The
innovative care concept, which is based on the requirements of the residents, is attracting a lot of
attention.

Inside the complex, there is a park with a pond, a long boulevard, several squares with cafés and
restaurants, as well as a theatre square. There is enough space to allow for the pronounced urge to move
typical for the illness, and there are plenty of areas for communication and social exchange. Although
people suffering from Alzheimer's disease are often still very fit physically, they have problems with
memory and mental capacity. They feel disoriented and can't manage without help. Here they can move
about freely on the grounds without having to worry about not finding their way back home again. A total
of 23 apartments are provided on a gross floor space of 12,000 m2. The row houses with clinker brick
facing are no more than two storeys high and contain one double room and seven single rooms each.
152 senior citizens live in 'De Hogeweyk' at the moment.

As opposed to normal care homes, the elderly residents share bungalows. They can continue living in the
manner they are used to there, with the necessary intensive supervision taking place behind the scenes.
Carers, who look after up to seven persons each, are integrated in the everyday life of the elderly,
appearing as supermarket salespersons, housemates, domestic services staff or family members. They
accompany the dementia patients wherever they go, but let them make their own decisions. Although the
patients are well looked after, they don’t feel locked in.
Alzheimer's Respite Centre
The Respite Centre is built in an 18th century walled kitchen garden; granite on the north and east, and
warm bricks stocks on the sunward walls. We have placed the building to frame views of new garden
spaces created between the new construction and the old enclosure. Each garden is orientated in a
different direction and intended to be experienced at different times of the day. Users can move around
rooms in the interior like a clock, experiencing change throughout their daily journey. Each garden is
planted to generate character appropriate to its orientation.
Arranged within this protected space are a series interconnected pavilions incorporating social spaces,
serene gardens and courtyards, through which patients may wander. A number of pathways naturally
loop back on themselves, always returning a person home again. The centre aims to eliminate any sense
of the institutional or medical through the use of careful, bespoke timber detailing, the relaxed flow of
internal and external spaces and generous day-lit spaces.
Santa Rita Geriatric Center
Geriatric centers should be optimistic places appealing to live in or to visit. The idea is to create a
characteristic atmosphere in a vital space where spare time prevails and where residents spend the last
years or months of their lives. The fact is that it is possible to build a geriatric center that does not look
like a hospital, with neither corridors nor architectural barriers and on a single floor, in which all the rooms
have direct access from (and towards) a garden that, as a sort of ‘lobby', acts also as direct access
towards (and from) the collective spaces. The aim is to ensure total accessibility, physical autonomy,
psychical security and respect to individual privacy, facilitating access to visitors.
Between the residential area and the polygonal perimeter emerges an open, interconnected, fluid, flat and
unusual space that accommodates at once the different program and circulation uses. Going over the
whole building means traversing a space with neither doors nor corridors, establishing paths that do not
necessarily entail a single solution. It is a ‘polyatmospheric' circulation space: a series of events that can
stimulate the senses and ease the disorientation and spatial tedium that one can ‘experience' in a
geriatric center.