![From left] Harlan Cleveland, Paul Ehrlich, and George Mitchell at the Third Woodlands Conference, 1979. Schmandt, v.](https://cdn.filepicker.io/api/file/jgmEsR1zToCmPLEZ2gQq/convert?fit=max&format=jpg&h=&quality=95&w=408&compress=true&fit=max)
Student Work
Title
The Open Hospice
Project Description
An average American spends a year or more of their old age disabled and confined to a nursing home, where aging is considered a medical condition and safety trumps lifestyle. Hospice care, in contrast, emphasizes quality of life, providing relief from the symptoms and stress of a life-limiting illness. By breaking apart a typically inward-facing typology, The Open Hospice fosters greater exchange with the surrounding public realm. Three residential prototypes offer independent, assisted and dependent domestic environments for a wide range of patients and families. A hospice care center pairs six in-patient hospice apartments with a collection of community resources – a café, dining room, library, clinic, meeting hall and chapel – to embed the facility within the surrounding community. A pedestrian spine stretches the length of the site, stitching together the community’s various elements and granting residents a convivial and vehicle-free public realm.