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.