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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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Off-Grid & Self-Sufficient: ReGen Villages with Vertical Farms

23 May

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

vertical farming

Presented at the 2016 Venice Architecture Bienalle, these new communities are designed to be entirely self-reliant, recycling their own waste, generating their own energy and producing their own food.

design village

integrated greenhouse

Dubbed ReGen by its creators at EFFEKT, this new self-sustaining community typology grew out of a Stanford University Paper and, thanks to the backing of entrepreneurs, the first pilot is set to launch in The Netherlands this summer with others coming to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany and, eventually, China and Africa.

regen community

regen model

Each village features combinations of homes, greenhouses and public buildings, interconnecting vertical farming efforts with everyday living. Like a dome-free version of some science-fiction vision, the idea is that each village unit is effectively self-contained, able to thrive off the grid without polluting or draining resources.

program

regent model

modular architecture

Integrated solar power systems provide energy for heating, cooling and electric cars. Community participants share responsibility for water and waste management systems. Various housing types are offered, each with modularity designed around seasonal energy savings and human comfort factors.

green village square

town at night

“Our modern lifestyle is utterly unsustainable and this calls for more resilient solutions for the future,” explained EFFEKT partner Sinus Lynge. “The technology already exists, it is just a matter of applying science into the architecture of everyday life. ReGen Villages is engineering and facilitating the development of off-grid, integrated and resilient neighbourhoods that power and feed self-reliant families around the world. The time has come to redefine residential real-estate development for the next three billion people coming to the planet.”

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

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Secret Slums: Ramshackle Rooftop Villages of Hong Kong

29 Dec

[ By WebUrbanist in Global & Travel & Places. ]

roof tops hong kong

These hidden shanty towns, often invisible from the streets below, sprawl like surrealist suburbs across the roofs of one of the most densely-populated and expensive cities in the world.

rooftop dwelling book cover

The book Portraits From Above meticulously documents a series of such informal micro-villages in Hong Kong with photographs, detailed diagrams and stories of life inside these illicit rooftop communities.

rooftop villages china distance

While the dwellings are unconventional in shape, the book’s drawings are almost deceptively refined, capturing the chaos in clean black-on-white architectural lines.

rooftop interior diagram drawing

Ad hoc architecture at its strangest, these structures are not governed by building codes or compliance issues. Found materials from sheet metal and scrap wood to discarded plastic and broken brick shape home walls and the narrow halls between homes.

rooftop shanty entry way

rooftop black white interior

Naturally, one downside of such unplanned habitats are the series of power and waste management issues that go with the territory.

rooftop community village diagram

rooftop shack aerial view

Despite living on the fringes – or perhaps because their shared connection – there are strong social ties between rooftop dwellers, and they were welcoming to the authors of this book, Stefan Canham and Rufina Wu, who sought to learn more about how people live in such offbeat accommodations. In many ways, too, these mini-cities are like smaller expressions of larger-scale phenomenon like the nearby but now-demolished Kowloon Walled City.