_DME4339-min

Location: The Nursing Home

The Nursing Home with the division at the Zamenhofa street provides its residents with a 24-hour care and comfort, assistance in performing daily activities and running personal and administrative errands. The residents receive social support, care and psychological counselling, as well as medical and nursing care.  Currently, in the division at the Zamenhofa street, there are 74 inpatients (women and men), predominantly chronically ill.

ACTIVITIES

Activities organised at the DPS aim mainly at shortening the adaptation process, encouraging the residents to be active and maintaining their physical and intellectual fitness. The residents have the opportunity to use different form of spending free time. Free time is organised by active therapy sessions which develop different areas of activity and cater for individual interests, talents and psycho-physical capabilities.

Cultural activity focuses on the integration of the disabled and able-bodied, overcoming barriers, creating mutual acceptance, tolerance and understanding. There are integration meetings organised, which aim at making, maintaining and developing bonds of the residents with families and the environment.

There is a green area with walking alleys around the DPS, which provides a possibility of resting outside, without the need to move far from the building. This area is used not only by the residents of the home, but also families and friends who come to visit.

NEEDS

During the meeting with the residents and their carers, the green area near the home was selected for the project activities, in the proximity to the routes frequented by the residents. The garden is used intensely before dinner, during the afternoon hours the number of users is significantly lower.

From the perspective of the therapeutic activities, the place should enable conducting rehabilitation activities in small 4-5 people groups, and ensure optimal conditions – shade, platform enabling wheelchair access, and small tables.  Physiotherapists pointed to the need to place elements enabling conducting exercise therapy, e.g. railings for walking exercises, 3 steps for walking up and walking down, with the possibility of competition between the participants, tables for board games. The residents most frequently play chess, chequers, and other board games. There was also a survey conducted with the inpatients and employees of the nursing home. The results show that significant aspects include increasing the usability of the area by introducing additional benches and tables enabling meetings, improving accessibility through platforms enabling crossing the high curbs, introducing roofing enabling shelter from rain and sun, possibility of integration and choice of leisure place depending on whether one wishes to spend time alone or in a group, and maintaining clean and ordered environment.

 

FINAL RESULTS

After some sketches whole group decided to make a functional design instead of shape- form design. Using the elements that are most needed, such as benches, tables, and shading they proposed the enclosed structure where everybody can stop at their daily walk and rest, talk or play.

Team group had a plan to put two objects to place in the garden and create the common framel language, however each of those would be uniq providing different activities and visual districtions. The proposal looks open what’s egsisting with an attempt to realitivate neglected and unused area to create functional places that would unable its users to owned the garden.

Student participiants:

Anna Blažková,  Dominik Buchting, Filip Till,  Kamil Parzychowski, Kristina Bohácová, Orsolya Vass, Robert Rössler, Weronika Kessler, Zuzana Belešová

Tutor: ARCHWERK- Martin Kloda + Hana Prochazkova

Architects from Czech Republic

The studio’s main focus is classical architecture and the design and implementation of original  experimental buildings, based mainly on the idea of technological and design simplicity, and site-specific projects using natural materials. The buildings erected as a result of a physical experiment, often with a low budget and their own physical work, have no ambition to change the perception of space or expand the boundaries of architecture, but rather to enrich a specific place and community. Archwerk goal is to create, in the style of medieval building workers, a strictly unlimited creative group able to design and execute high-quality architectural works which cultivate (not only) Czech landscape and society.