Buildings for dementia
‘Losing Myself’ at the 2016 Venice Biennale explored a research collaboration between two Bartlett architecture lecturers and a group of UCL dementia specialists.
Architects are often called upon to design buildings for people with experiences wildly different to their own. When asked to design for a person for whom space has ceased to be a stable entity, these difficulties become even more acute.
This was a challenge faced by Níall McLaughlin and Yeoryia Manolopoulou – both Unit 17 tutors at The Bartlett School of Architecture – when they presented the Irish Pavilion at 2016’s Venice Biennale of Architecture. Their installation, ‘Losing Myself’, is a “reflective report” on their extensive research and experimentation into designing for people with dementia, and represents the lessons learned through this process.
The installation itself is a time-based projected drawing – 16 hands, representing 16 architects, who were asked to call upon their own experiences in order to imagine the experience of people living in an Alzheimer’s centre, sketch out fragments of a whole building plan, a layered network of individual journeys and interpretations of the space. It is a tentative step towards fathoming the condition of dementia and the project hopes to provide an insight into the variety of ways in which people perceive space.
Losing Myself is an ambitious yet self-aware project – considerate of the fact that dementia is a disease that remains only partially understood. It attempts to both communicate the changes in spatial perception by those with dementia, while at the same time questioning the capacity of architectural reconstructions to provide meaningful observations on their experiences.
As much a part of the project as the installation itself is the website, losingmyself.ie Specially designed in collaboration with UCL dementia specialists to be as inclusive and accessible to architecture professionals and people with dementia alike, it functions as a repository for McLaughlin’s and Manolopoulou’s research. It’s intended to outlast the installation and serve as a tool for architects and researchers into the disease.
This project typifies a field of practice that continues to thrive at The Bartlett School of Architecture, that of Design Research.
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