Description

Inter-generational contact between the youngest and the oldest members of our society is the driving idea behind the competition-winning design of this project. The combination of a home for the elderly and children’s nursery is intended to create synergies beneficial for both groups: in an age in which family structures are dissolving, both old people as well as children have an opportunity to establish cross-generational relationships based on affinity.

The arrangement of three parallel strips of buildings slightly offset to one another in a north-south direction creates an entrance terrace on the south side. The terrace adjoins both the three-storey home for the elderly and the single-storey children’s nursery and also serves as a terrace for the dining room. A connecting element runs crossways acting as a clasp that joins the buildings with one another. Over and above its function as circulation, this also provides a stimulating route that alternates between inside and outside: at one end the large windows in the foyer of the home afford a view out towards the church while the dining room and the entrance to the children’s nursery have an inward focus. The far end of the corridor looks out over the Alpine landscape.

The home for the elderly is organised as a series of paths and public spaces analogous to a small town. The heart of the building is a central courtyard formed by a parting between two of the building’s strips. Walkways lead around the courtyard. The ground level houses the care facilities, offices and staff rooms as well as the residents’ common room. Both of the upper storeys contain apartments with a care station on each floor.

The residents’ rooms are reached via small seating niches in the walkways, which face out onto the courtyard and serve as places to meet. Every room also has direct contact to the world outside in the form of a French window that is part of a box-framed window. This can serve as a place to sit in the sun or as a window box for flowers. A balcony window on one side provides ventilation and fresh air. Earth tones and warm colours characterise the atmosphere within the interiors and provide orientation.

Despite its integrative approach, the contrasting forms and elaboration of the façades reveal characteristic differences between the section for the young and for the old. The home for the elderly, with its homogenous cladding of horizontal larch weather­boarding, rhythmic pattern of windows and rectangular shape, appears weighty while the glass façades and sailing roofs of the children’s nursery, reminiscent of flapping wings, embody a sense of lightness.

---

Originally published in: Eckhard Feddersen, Insa Lüdtke, Living for the Elderly: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2011.