Urban Holistic Health “Aging in the City”

What happens after your “best days” are behind you? After you have become old and wise? Once you have lived a life of connection both digitally and physically. Where do you go to live the latter years of your life? As you age how do you interact with the built environment? How does it interact with you?

Within the architectural profession, there was an emphasis on exploring strategies and tactics to target the “younger generation” and sculpting the built environment based on the way they wanted to live. However, very little attention was given to these generations as they passed through life, particularly the post-retirement stage. With the average retirement of an individual spanning 18 years, it became a large part of their lives where the solutions for interacting with the built environment seemed unevolved from previous generations. Through a collaborative studio, we focused on this latter stage of our lives. The studio explored the fringe condition created by the intersection of the architectural vehicle, senior living, and the contemporary ethos of senior living, studying places in the world where people lived longer and healthier lives with below-average dependence on modern medicine. The studio was challenged with navigating the complex issues facing the senior community, including both in the built environment and in contemporary society. We engaged in a process that covered macro topics including research, programming, site planning, and building planning, and micro topics such as senior-centric design and inclusive design. Each team was challenged to spatially represent their unique solution through form and detail. Although the overall studio goals were known, each team’s process and the deliverables associated with them were left somewhat flexible to allow the best and most clear documentation of the idea.