Going home: future adaptive building for aging-in-place

Up to 95% of North American houses have not been designed by an architect. The result is what the Sierra Club calls the ‘Dark Side of the American Dream’ - a vast, formless, un-designed place where almost everyone lives. This work explores potential strategies for architects to meaningfully engage this middle ground of everyday domestic life.

The PhD frames this exploration through the creative practices of John Brown; an architect and academic in Calgary, Canada. Ambitious to make architectural intelligence available to the widest possible clientele he pursues a practice that creates a continuum between everyday living and the highest accomplishments of architecture. His PhD opens up accessibilities to the best of flexible designing to people from the young to those aging in place.

The PhD traces the development of a body of work that includes furniture and objects, innovative forms of architectural practice, advocacy, and over 250 residential projects. It builds on this critical reflection to propose a new housing option for 21st century seniors. Future Adaptive Building (FAB) is an interior system of design, construction, and inhabitation that can adapt to meet changes in lifestyle, physical health, and cognitive health. It supports the dynamic realities of long term aging-in-place across the full spectrum of housing types that includes single-family houses, townhouses, and low-rise and high-rise apartments. FAB incorporates strategies from a diverse realm of ideas about mass customization, serious leisure, and the geography of care to create an adaptive residential interior building system.

The FAB system is designed to help improve an individual’s functional, emotional, and physical resilience to the natural changes that occur with aging. FAB can be applied to both new-build and major re-build projects and is designed to readily and cost-effectively integrate into the normative processes of the residential development, design, and construction industries.

The PhD explores a temporal cross-section of the development of Future Adaptive Building, cut along a personal narrative of practice. It begins with an examination of the lessons learned from 26 years of design/build practice in residential architecture and ends with a detailed account of recent academic and practice-based work in age-in-place design. It delineates a context for ongoing design research into the role of the architect in making quotidian domestic environments.