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The Lantern: Dementia Villages Replicate Small Towns Inside Big Boxes

13 Sep

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]

main street usa

Complete with a Main Street, a barber shop and hardware store, this town-in-a-box is designed to make elderly patients with memory loss feel at home in a surrealistic interior setting.

natural square

The Lantern operates a series of such “villages” in Ohio, each looking as much like a movie set as a walkable small town or historic suburb, complete with fake grass, cafe tables and street lamps.

main street

the village

Cute homes are accented with porches and rocking chairs while a high-tech ceiling overhead projects bird sounds and features a high-tech sky display that shifts over the course of the day (and night).

front porch

village interior

The dwellings and other buildings are draw inspiration from the 1940s – in other words: they are made to look like the same places the people living here grew up in.

dining hall

side hall

CEO Jean Makesh got his idea to develop this set of facilities while working as an occupational therapists in less-inviting facilities. His core vision involved using biophilic design to support normal and active lifestyles that would minimize habit disruption and transition anxiety for incoming residents.

It would be too easy to draw comparisons between this place and science-fictional film dystopias, but the reality is that for most residents this assisted-living facility is much homier than a stark white hospital-style complex.

no exit

dimentia town

A similar-but-outdoor complex in Holland has also been developed along the same lines, containing residents with controlled exits and disguised staff while providing the illusion of an open town through shops and streets.

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]

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Drowned Towns: 10 Underwater Ghost Cities & Buildings

10 Mar

[ By Steph in Global & Travel & Places. ]

Drowned Towns Main

Mildewed crosses, lonely spires, barely-visible stone foundations and rusting bed frames are all that’s left to show for these 10 intentionally submerged towns and structures from India to Massachusetts. When additional water and power is needed to provide for growing populations, small villages often have to be sacrificed, and while some were demolished before their remains were flooded, others can still be seen as ghostly visions wavering beneath the surface.

Potosi, Venezuela

Drowned Towns Potosi 1

Drowned Towns Potosi 2

Another town lost to the creation of a hydroelectric dam, Potosi was abandoned in 1985, its residents relocating and leaving their former homes to be filled with water. For 20 years, all that was visible of the Veneuzuelan town was a single mildewed cross topping a drowned church, but by the year 2010, the waters began to recede and the town slowly reappeared. The gothic church that was once submerged is visible again due to droughts and water shortages, erosion and water damage making it appear much older than it really is.

Steeple Tombstone: Curon Venosta, Italy

Drowned Towns Steeple Tomb 1

Drowned Towns Steeple Tomb 2

A single spire marks the location of an entire town lost beneath Lago di Resia. The alpine village of Curon Venosta was flooded soon after World War II when officials decided to merge three pre-existing lakes into one to create a hydroelectric dam. Before it was inundated, the town – which included 163 houses and nearly 1,300 acres of land planted with fruit – was filled with sand. The bell tower, which was built in the 14th century, was left intact as a memorial, and can be reached on foot in the winter when the lake freezes over.

Vilarinho da Furna, Portugal

Drowned Towns Vilarinho da Furna

In 1972, the creation of a new dam meant the ancient Vilarinho da Furna was lost beneath the water. The Portuguese village, which dates back to Roman times, was home to almost 300 people inhabiting 80 houses before it was submerged; the property still belongs to their descendants, and reappears every now and then when the reservoir levels fall. The community was unique in that it had a communitarian social system with a council called the Junta made up of a single member from each family, a practice dating back to the Visigoths. When the villagers left they took as much as they could, creating their own road to transport things like rocks and roof tiles to their new homes. Some of those rocks were used to build a museum commemorating Vilarinho da Furna, which contains a collection of clothing, agricultural tools, and paintings depicting daily life in the village.

Jal Mahal, Jaipur, India

Drowned Towns Jal Mahal 1

Drowned Towns Jal Mahal 2

The Water Palace of Jaipur, India sits in the center of Man Sagar Lake. No one knows exactly when it was built, but it’s believed that the red sandstone structure is at least 300 years old and was constructed before damming created the lake, submerging its lower four stories. When the lake is full, only the top level can be reached, and only by boa. At night, the place is illuminated with floodlights like some kind of hallucinatory ghost structure. The palace was recently restored and is now open to visitors.

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Drowned Towns 10 Underwater Ghost Cities Buildings

[ By Steph in Global & Travel & Places. ]

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NJ Ghost Towns – The Bridge To NoWhere ! – Flatbrook River, Delaware Water Gap NJ

21 Dec

New Jersey Ghost Towns: Along the Delaware River are entire towns where the people were forced out by the government in the 60s because they were going to flood the towns and build a huge reservoir. This was known as the ‘Tocks River Project’ (there are numerous books on the subject). After this ‘forced evacuation’ two problems came up. The first was the Vietnam War which caused all funding to be diverted toward the war effort. The second, although not widely publicized, was the fact that the mountain that was supposed to support the proposed dam, didn’t have the right foundation to hold the water back as previously thought. As the genius of government decisions go, they tried to raise funds for the project by putting an ad in the local newspapers and renting out the abandoned houses. Well, you can imagine how those people felt who were forced out of their homes and lost everything to see ‘migrating hippies’ from New York City descending down on the area in droves. Hundreds squatted in these homes getting government checks to live there. One night, again, the government had the National Guard and State Police Agencies descend down upon the area to chase the squatters. Now, years later, you can see the remnants of these deserted houses and towns, now in the Federal Domain, but since the government is pretty much fund-less, what’s left of the houses, the towns and the surrounding land lie in limbo in a bunch of government red tape. In this video, check out the Bridge To …
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Cities on Rails: Mobile Master Plan Turns Trains into Towns

01 Nov

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

Modular thinking is brilliant and infectious, expanding and spreading from industrial-revolution technologies to three-dimensional printing and beyond. But how big can modularity get? Imagine the same concept applied to cities that move, grow and shrink on demand, gaining or shedding functions and spaces as needed.

Spoiler alert: science-fiction writer China Mieville (of whom this author is a serious fan) first envisioned a permanent mobile life on rails in Iron Council, where residents deploy tracks in front of (then pull them up behind) an ever-moving rogue locomotive. Then in Railsea, he expanded this idea in a world where every inch of land is covered by iron rails and wooden ties. It sounds like far-fetched fantasy, but could something like this work in reality?

The Swedish architecture firm Jagnefalt Milton asks and answers this question in their daring and award-winning design of A Rolling Master Plan, conceived of as a way to utilize existing rail routes to shift entire towns – or even cities – worth of people and places.

Consider seasonal migrations, for instance: festivals, markets, concerts and other events that move throughout the year. What if they could take their architecture with them as they traveled? Then there are hotels, restaurants and other commercial functions that see demand change over time as well as by season. What if they could deploy rooms or eateries around a country at will? Sure, it is conceptual, but the real-life applications are astonishing once you start thinking about ways buildings could adapt if only they could move more freely.

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360Photography

Posts Tagged ‘Towns’

The Lantern: Dementia Villages Replicate Small Towns Inside Big Boxes