Sonoma grove, nursing centre in

San Francisco

Working individual project, 2022

Old age or sickness is not the end of life, but the point to start all over again. This motto was the basement of the Nursing centre in San Francisco.

The center now has one building and 20 rooms in it, but with the increasing percentage of people in need of special care, the management decided to create a new building and transfer equipment to it, leaving the old unsuitable building for household needs. Also, an important task was to make the new housing modular. This was the idea to create a model design for a building that would be universal to other places to help people around America.

During a tour of the existing area, I noticed a large oak park and a garden with flowers next to the rooms . Also, the interior concept of the existing building consists of black-and-white photographs from the past. So, in thinking about the concept, I talked to doctors and found out that it’s the connection to the ground through parks and gardening that has a positive impact on health and a lot photographs can be a bridge for patient’s memory. Therefore, gardening can be a action for people to feel life and to heal themselves they can heal together with plants. So, I chose wood and for budget reduction it became main material for interior and exterior, also the main structural material, so as not to create additional finishes in interior design.

We are able to find ourselves in new photos

Together with the American company S2A, I developed the idea of modular serial production for the future expansion of the center across America. The centre consists of 4 modules: an active zone module with a dining area, a venue for events and people gathering, a kitchen module with the possibility of connecting several modules, several corridor modules and two residential units module.

Skylights are used for lighting with wooden bars, which control overheating corridors

Plan at elevation +0.000 with furniture, necessary platforms and landscape desitgn

Decorative wall with main information

Kitchen module

Activity module

Transition modules

Living modules

Four units of living parts were created, connected by corridor modules, which lead to the activity module with a kitchen. The modules are a universal constructor, and in this place their location are created because of the desire to save all existing plants and oaks. This created a yard between the two buildings, and each room had its own exit to the terrace or garden.

When creating the exterior of the project, a wood was chosen as the basis of the entire project. Therefore, the main structures and windows are presented exclusively wooden, as well as for shading rooms in view of the hot weather in San Francisco were developed separate modules of wooden adjustable rails. The same bars are used in the interior from overheating corridors, where skylights are used for lighting. Also due to the relief, many rooms got their own terraces and the ability to grow plants right next to the room, and where the relief was too high to maintain a barrier-free environment, the rooms remained at zero, but fences were installed on all terraces, on which it will also be possible to grow plants in special pots. idual houses of extremely modest size with