Intersecting Authorships in Community-Based Healthcare Architecture for the Elderly

Abstract

Contemporary architectural discourse redefines authorship as an intersecting, collaborative paradigm involving multidisciplinary contributors. Research on care and cure has gained significant attention in recent years, driven by the increasing global focus on the ageing issue and the impact of the pandemic, particularly in architectural design research. This research project investigates community-based healthcare architecture for the elderly through attention to the performance of transitional spaces between inside and outside, public and private, and built and natural realms. The study aims to identify current European practices and recurring design features in elderly healthcare spaces and to develop design principles and tools for future projects that integrate built and natural environments as one system. The design-driven approach will be applied in the project, following the hypothesis that integrating public spaces into community-based healthcare architecture and revising the character of circulation spaces may lead to a definition of better-quality living spaces for the elderly on functional, typological, social, and biological levels.

Keywords: healthcare architectural design, cure and care, elderly communities