Avant-housing for the elderly

This unique box-and-void designed by Aires Mateus Arquitectos for an assisted living center redefines the boundaries between public and private.

Most assisted-living residencies still do not look beyond the most fundamental of insitutional designs. Portuguese studio Aires Mateus Arquitectos has read the lifestyle needs and hopes of an elderly community, a kind of microcosm of society "with its own rules," and responded with a daring formalism that repositions the conventional boundaries of public and private.

With a program that is meant to insure a measure of independence for its residents—who, although they contend with reduced mobility, also favor time outdoors—the exaggerated crenellations delineate individual living units. The variable expression of the structure reinforces the individuality of its inhabitants. At the same time, by not being aggregated into an anonymous, clinical whole, they retain privacy and options for solitude.

The site also operates as a grand path that embraces the architecture. The long building hews to the contours of the site, a multivolume white wall emerging from the topography. Delimiting and defining the open space, this housing articulates a unique combination of the porous and the monumental. Alan Rapp

The reduct mobility of those who will live in the building suggests that any displacement should be an emotive and variable experience.

Name and site of the project
Residências Assistidas em Alcácer do Sal (Portugal)
House for Elderly people in Alcácer do Sal
Casa di riposo per anziani ad Alcácer do Sal
Architects
Francisco Aire Mateus
Manuel Aire Mateus
Design team
Giacomo Brenna
Paola Marini
Anna Bacchetta
Miguel Pereira
Structural engineering
Engitarget
Constructor
Ramos Catarino
Construction supervision
Rui Prata Riberiro (fiscalização)
Landscape design
Luis Alçada Batista - ABAP
Client
Santa Casa da Misericordia
Built area
3640 m2 gross floor area
(1560 m2 footprint área)
Cost
3,500,000 Euros (construction cost)
Design phase
2006 – 2007
Construction phase
09/2008 – 07/2010

The project is based on a attentive reading of the life of a very specific kind of community, a sort of a micro-society with its own rules.

The program is, somewhere in between a hotel and a hospital, that seeks to comprehend and reinterpret the combination social/private, answering to the needs of a social life, and at the same time of solitude.

The building designed path is a wall that naturally rises from the topography: it limits and defines the open space, organizing the entire plot.

Independents unities aggregate into a unique body, whose design is expressive and clear.

Avant-housing for the elderly

This unique box-and-void designed by Aires Mateus Arquitectos for an assisted living center redefines the boundaries between public and private.

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