As part of its research into solving the housing needs of the UK’s ageing population, the government-commissioned Happi panel visited the visionary Maartenshof scheme in the Netherlands with an apartment tower by Arons en Gelauff Architecten and community hub by Team 4 Architects
Growing old gracefully is not what it used to be. Although we now live longer, we exercise less, eat more, and are better at spending than saving.
Official statistics predict that the number of over-60s will increase by seven million over the next 25 years, and the number of “oldest old” — those aged 85 and over — will more than double by 2033. While the youngest segment of the population — aged 5 to 15 years — is shrinking, new research published in the Lancet indicates that more than half of babies born now in the UK will live to be 100.
Not only is our housing stock ill-suited to these profound changes, but our society as a whole — economically, culturally and definitely architecturally — is a long way behind the demographic curve. Policy initiatives such as Lifetime Homes — the 16-point housing design standard for accessibility and adaptability, first published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 1997 — sought to anticipate these changes, while responding to our preference for staying in our own homes as we age, rather than moving into “specialist” housing, such as sheltered, “extra-care”, or retirement accommodation.
The government has extended the Lifetime Homes concept to the entire domestic environment. The 2008 publication of Lifetime Homes, Lifetime Neighbourhoods: A National Strategy for Housing in an Ageing Society went some way to developing a joined-up vision of a future with less barriers for the elderly. It is a vision that also makes urban design sense, emphasising mixed communities and safe environments, with access to transport, shops and parks prescribing a baseline for good development.
Credit: Allard van der Hoek
The communal base of De Rokade tower.But there is a piece of the puzzle that these efforts, with their accent on answering people’s needs, or what they think are their needs, left out. This omission did not go unnoticed and in June this year a panel of experts collectively known as Happi (Housing our Ageing Population: Panel for Innovation) was commissioned by the Homes & Communities Agency (HCA) to address it. What if, the panel asked, we had more housing choices as we grew older? Choice about lifestyle, and how the care and support we may need is delivered, or forms part of a housing package.
The panel, comprising diverse figures from industry and public life — including former RIBA president Richard MacCormac, housebuilder Tony Pidgley who recently stepped down as managing director of Berkeley Group Holdings, and Aggie MacKenzie of Channel 4’s How Clean is Your House — was chaired by leading authority on housing Richard Best, who said: “Without a sufficiently attractive offer, most of us will stay put in homes that may gradually become harder to manage, maintain and keep warm, [become] increasingly inaccessible and, sometimes, insecure and lonely places to spend a large part of every day.”
While at pains to acknowledge that there is nothing wrong with staying put, the panel joined the dots, in their deliberations, between the national shortage of family homes and the fact that older people — many of them “empty nesters” — have control over much of the £932 billion of equity tied up in UK homes. If well-designed schemes could tempt this target market, with a lifestyle choice that had real appeal, they might help reduce housing demand, while, at the same time, freeing up badly needed family homes, many with gardens. It is especially important, so the marketing argument goes, to catch older homebuyers while they are still comparatively young.
Investigating what form such an offer would take, the panel set out to look at the best of the sector, examining a range of typologies that combined housing with care at various levels — from retirement villages to small-scale co-housing initiatives. It also considered how best to raise aspirations, acknowledging that we are, in the wise words of panel member Vera Bolter, “confined by what we know, and what we may think we want because we haven’t seen that things could be different”.
Jaunty and exuberant, De Rokade housing tower in Groningen, the Netherlands, goes some way to showing just how different things could be. Confounding British expectations of housing for older people, in the way that BD readers may have come to expect from Dutch architecture, the building by young practice Arons en Gelauff Architecten takes a tired social programme and reinvents it, making our eyes water with its unself-conscious can-do approach. The design pushes at the boundaries of the public image of elderly housing. Instead of the sector’s customary low-key, discreet architecture — at pains to fit in — this building makes a spectacle of itself.
Credit: Allard van der Hoek
The cruciform-plan tower contains 74 apartments that offer up to 115sq m and feature windows facing in two directions.In my capacity as researcher on the Happi project, I accompanied the panel on the Netherlands trip, one of six tours that took in 24 case studies in Europe and the UK. The support team included a film crew, which produced short films of each of the major schemes, available to download on the HCA’s website.
De Rokade’s iconic architecture provides a beacon for Maartenshof, an extensive continuing care facility that boasts several types of accommodation, including 200 day care and nursing beds, social rented sheltered housing and a kindergarten. At the heart of the complex is a new community hub, served by its own bus stop, which provides facilities for Maartenshof residents and the wider neighbourhood.
Groningen’s sustainability policies promote the alignment of public transport routes and patterns of dense occupation according to the now widely accepted model of compact urban living.
The corner site of the De Rokade tower was identified in the municipality’s 2003 Intense City development programme, a project that sought to upgrade Maartenshof’s existing elderly care facilities, adding around 80 beds, improved day care and provided flats for sale to a generation of homeowners who had outgrown cliched ideas about housing for older people.
Six years on, Maartenshof’s new community hub, designed by Team 4 Architects, and the De Rokade tower are the most evident results of that project. In the cruciform-plan tower, 74 apartments, including two penthouses, offer up to 115sq m of floor space, each with their own store room and parking place in the two-storey podium that is raised above ground-floor commercial space. Signature round windows, bubbling up De Rokade’s elevations and along the podium block, define the building’s droll personality.
The tower’s joie de vivre is echoed in the double-height Maartenshof hub — a giant foyer conceived as a public space for all seasons, somewhere between a traditional town square and a duty-free food court.
The materials and furnishings of the hub establish a visual dialogue between inside and outside, through devices such as jokey lighting standards that mimic bedside lamps at super-scale.
Such a rhetorical design gesture would be meaningless unless followed through in everyday life. On the day of our visit, a convivial market occupied this threshold with activities, colours and sounds. Among the public-facing facilities are a convenience store, café and beauty therapist, as well as the kindergarten at the hub’s doorstep. The constituent parts reinforce its social functionality.
Credit: Natalie Willer
The Maartenshof hub was one of 24 case studies visited by the Happi panel, which includes Richard MacCormac (right).While conducting “‘social research” to transform the brief for De Rokade tower into a design concept, 41-year-old architect Floor Arons “suddenly realised it wasn’t ‘old people’ I was designing for — it was my parents: the hippy generation”. Until then, Arons explained, he had absent-mindedly thought of older people as a homogeneous group rather than as individuals with specific cultures and personal preferences. The styling of retirement and care homes tends to veer between institutional and sentimental architecture. Here, such stereotypes are rejected in favour of a building that potential buyers, who must be over 55 to move in, “will either love or hate”.
Jacqueline van Wijngaarden loves it. “We like the new, exciting image of the building,” she says. Her two-bedroom, L-shaped apartment is much like any other in the block — although the plan does allow for flexibility in the layout, with several configurations of partitions and sliding doors on offer — but she has made it her own. She collects ornamental hedgehogs, which sit on every surface. Even her fluffy dog has a stuffed toy hedgehog to play with.
“We had — before, in the working life — a business and lived above it. After that we had a farm. I liked working in the garden but it was too much,” she says.
She feels that apartment living has given her more options. “I have very much to do — concerts, theatre shopping,” she says. “It’s an old town, so there are lots of things to see.”
Her new urban lifestyle, made possible by the availability of a stylish, loose-fit apartment close to a care hub, which offers the security of knowing help is at hand should she need it, has given her a new lease of life.
The robust design of De Rokade promotes the concept of the home as an anchor for personal freedom. According to panel member Judith Torrington, a specialist housing researcher at the University of Sheffield, the generous internal layouts “make all the right basic moves”, such as the L-shaped plan, which allows you to look back at your own home, and to have windows facing in two directions. Despite sometimes utilitarian details, and the arguably willful exterior, the building strikes a balance between flexibility and identity, encouraging residents to treat each apartment as a three-dimensional canvas on which to portray their own character.
This balance, between strong identity and opportunities for appropriation, between institutional structure and spatial flexibility, is a factor in the success of both the De Rokade block and the Maartenshof hub. It contributes to the civilising influence of the scheme. The architecture, encountered by its residents and the community as a place, imparts a level of joyful dignity and candid respect appropriate to our endeavours as we grow older.
Matthew Barac is a senior architect at Pollard Thomas Edwards architects.
Original print headline - The new ‘old style’
Source: bdonline.co.uk/
