Memories of Home: An Emotional Landscape for Elderly Care
Date
2024-04-10
Authors
Curren, Breanna
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Abstract
Institutional healthcare models are failing Canada’s elderly. A long culture of agism has led
to the creation of sterile, visually dominant, and commodified architectural environments
that lack the emotional and social supports needed during an inherently vulnerable
time of life. Through architectural memory, emotion, and sensory experience, a people-focused
approach to elderly care engages a person’s sense of self, belonging, and place.
Intergenerational programming for the elderly, the surrounding community, and caregivers,
intertwines creative care concepts with health and housing. Place, path, pattern, edge, and
emotive materials are parameters that transform the intangible qualities of human life into
a physical configuration of spatial emotion. Wallace, Nova Scotia, was used as a testing
site to explore the various scales of place using the working methods of continuous line
drawings, imagined narratives, and memory mapping to identify and cultivate a habitus of
place for the elderly to live.
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Keywords
Wallace, Nova Scotia, Emotional Architecture, Elderly Care, Landscape, Memory