Statement about the Research Content and Process

Description

This project examines, through an architectural lens, the experiences of people living with Alzheimer’s disease and associated challenges and opportunities affecting the design, maintenance and management of buildings and communities. It aims to encourage thought and debate around dementia design, critiquing current reductive design guidelines while proposing an original mode of drawing centred on human experience.

Questions

1. How does the human mind create an understanding of space?

2. What findings from neuroscience, art, anthropology, healthcare and policy can help architects design for people living with dementia and, more broadly, for all of us?

3. In what ways can we advance architectural representation to reflect these findings?

4. How can specialist design knowledge support all stages of building or redesign?

5. How can we build dementia-friendly cities from the outset?

Methodology

1. Dialogues: critical conversations across disciplines from health policy to neuropsychology and with people and carers affected by dementia in the UK and Ireland; 2. Stories: a collection of accounts by friends and relatives of people with

Alzheimer’s disease;

3. Drawing: investigating a new method of architectural representation to describe space from the perspective of occupants, culminating into an immersive installation with informed and emotional content;

4. Collaboration: working closely with a collective of architects, graphic designers, installation and sound artists;

5. Communication: developing a website that effectively shares our research with non-specialist audiences.

Dissemination

The Irish Pavilion was one of the highlights of the 2016 Venice Biennale, which in six months attracted 260,000 visitors. It was globally reviewed in diverse publications like The Lancet, WIRED, The Irish Times and Il Sole 24 Ore. Its website is a dementiafriendly repository of findings on open access. The authors have discussed their research in publications like Arts and Dementia: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Mateus-Berr and Gruber 2020) and in public presentations for the Wellcome Collection, University of Quebec, Indian Institute of Management, RIAI, RIBA and the House of Lords Select Committee, among many institutions.

Project Highlights

Losing Myself formed the sole representation of Ireland at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia in 2016, and was shortlisted for the RIBA President’s Awards for Research in the Design & Technical category in 2017. It is the first architecture project to examine dementia by bringing together perspectives from neuroscience, anthropology, health, art and design. It introduces and explores the neurobiological function of allocentric and egocentric spatial referencing in architectural drawing for the first time.

The authors have created an open-access report on dementia design recommendations, called ‘16 Lessons: What we have learned’, advocating for a holistic approach to creating and sustaining design-friendly buildings and communities for all, available at www.losingmyself.ie.

Statement of Inclusion of Earlier Work

Losing Myself started from revisiting The Orchard Alzheimer’s Respite Centre to examine it as a building in use six years after its completion. It is on this basis that this folio refers to it briefly.

4 (overleaf) The Irish Pavilion, 15th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, 2016.