ARCH_500-600 Comprehensive Options Studio: ‘Habilitation for Xi’an’

“Every person—in every country in the world—should have the opportunity to live a long and healthy life. The environments in which we live can favor health or be harmful to it. Healthy Ageing is about creating built environments and opportunities that enable people to be and do what they value throughout their lives”

-“What is Healthy Aging?” World Health Organization

Architects and designers increasingly view the design of long-term care, assisted living, and healthy aging communities as “habilitation,” a therapeutic approach to caring for older people with various chronic diseases. Through its multiple and interconnected disciplines, habilitation promotes well-being and healthy functioning among older people in daily living. Habilitation differs from rehabilitation, which seeks to restore external function, by its emphasis on the internal: emotion. 

Students were challenged to design a healthy aging community that attains habilitation by addressing the following four areas of concern: 1) design of community planning, including context, function, flow, connection, location, special-care units, and community services; 2) design of building configuration, including orientation, form, indoor/outdoor spaces, landscape, and spaces for community engagement; 3) research on environmental attributes, including non-institutional/home-style character, privacy, sensory stimulation, lighting, and safety; 4) and the study of specific rooms and active spaces, including living, bath, dining, kitchen, and bedrooms.

The project site was located in Xi’an, one of the oldest cities in China. The city was the capital of several important dynasties throughout Chinese history. In the first six weeks, students examined precedents related to habilitation and analyzed the problems and potential of the given site, developing a program proposal and conceptual designs. This was followed by a field trip to Xi’an. During their travels, students investigated the site, toured the city, and delivered a mid-term pin-up presentation to the developer, local architects, and therapists. They also organized a half-day seminar on the topic of habilitation at Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology. Following the studio trip, students further developed their concepts and designs into small-scale conceptual models and large-scale material studies or detailed mockups.

This was a highly collaborative studio, relying on the expertise of several professionals, including Xiabo Quan, PhD, collaborator; Carolyn Baum, PhD, Lisa Connor, PhD, Jessica Dashner, OTD, and Alex Wong, PhD, from the Program in Occupational Therapy (OT) at Washington University in St. Louis, and Donna Ware (Barnes-Jewish Hospital), who delivered lectures on different topics related to OT fundamentals and modern practices; and Paul Whitson (HOK), David Polzin (CannonDesign), Dan Hellmuth (Hellmuth + Bicknese), Yueyan Li, and Qian Zhang (Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology) who reviewed student projects.