The Architecture of Care: Maintenance Cycles for an Intentional Caregiving Community

Abstract

This thesis celebrates the work of care, caregiving for a person and caretaking for a building. It argues that these two maintenance processes are worthy drivers of architectural design as they are central to the relationship of people to their built environment. This project develops a design system for an intentional caregiving community based on three maintenance strategies: programming care, layered care and zoned care. This system is tested through the design of gathering hub for a caregiving community in the Laurentian region of Quebec. The design intervention includes three central buildings, each functioning as a gathering space and a facility for domestic work in tandem. At the scale of the settlement, building and detail the proposed architecture strives for community self-reliance and building longevity as a result of user engagement in building maintenance.