Leo Campbell, principal of Campbell Luscombe Architects, was recently awarded the Most Outstanding Architect in Over 50s Housing in the World in 2011 at the Global Over 50s Housing — Healthcare awards.
In his 34 years as principal of Campbell Luscombe Architects, he has specialised in aged care and seniors living.
Architecture & Design spoke to Campbell about the challenges of designing aged care facilities, how Australia’s facilities compare to those overseas and the year ahead for Campbell Luscombe Architects.
What is the hardest aspect of designing for over 50s?
Unlike general ‘multi-unit housing’ that needs to cater to a broad range of household types, the seniors independent dwelling is built for a very specific age group in their mid to late 70s. Like most housing, seniors dwellings must respond to the aesthetic aspirations and memories of their senior residents. We generally approach this response by utilising a dignified contemporary interpretation of the architecture of a familiar and substantial epoch.
One aspect that is significantly emerging from other countries is the desire for a more seamless approach to access the care services and those services relationship to accommodation.
With regard to the residential aged care facility, most operators would now promote the aversion to ‘bigness’, both spatially and numerically, despite the necessities of scale that are required to make these facilities viable. We attempt to avoid, disguise or play down institutionalism, resulting in the conscious jettisoning of the ‘hospital’ model and promoting an appearance and organisation that favours a smaller domestic ‘homelike’ environment with domestic scale and features rather than institutional ones.
What are the main challenges of aged care design in Australia?
One strange response to seniors’ developments in Australia is the widespread hostility of the general community to seniors communities and aged care facilities. There are some obvious motivations for this hostility, ie. larger scaled developments being introduced into existing suburban contexts and the demographic cluster of one age group into a community, amongst others.
The big challenge to developers and operators is the recognition that seniors residents now desire to remain close to urban centres and family. In many respects the seniors group have rejected the seachange concept in order to stay close to family and old familiar social networks.
Image: Campbell Luscombe Architects
What characterises a well designed aged care facility?
When designing for the senior and aged care environment, common thinking often revolves around simply removing barriers to mobility access and physical activity and the other ways in which we navigate and participate in our environs and community. Essential as these considerations must be, the seniors environment must look beyond the mere removal of, say inconvenient steps, and look to create ‘enabling environments’.
As well as the obvious specifically designed aids, ramps, rails etc. It is often just the careful consideration of the every day items that we pass by that often make the difference between comfort and an environmental barrier — the height of a switch or bench, sufficient room to manouvre through a doorway.
With the impact of market driven attitudes to seniors’ architecture there is an added expectation for finishes and fitments to not only meet requirements but also reflect quality.
How is Australia’s aged care design different from other countries?
There is a tendency in Europe and the UK for more urban seniors developments. Australia, as in many other aspects, had followed an older American pattern of putting seniors on the fringes of cities or in isolated ‘sun belt’ communities. The Americans did have the advantage that these isolated communities were so large as to become de-facto communities.
The American seniors community was also able to promote a more seamless graduation of care, from independence to high end care within these large communities than has been achieved in the more structured Australian system. The smaller scale of Australian retirement developments just ensured isolation and limited access to community facilities.
The majority of operators/developers in Australia now realise the aged market is desiring the more European trend of ageing within one’s community, maintaining existing social and family connections.
What types of innovation have there been recently in aged care design?
Perhaps the most important element in design over the past decade has been greater attention to the residents’ quality of life. It has had an impact on every level of care, including architecture. The level and intensity of care adjusts as the health of the resident changes. This adjustment can take place in a single facility which accommodated life changes without the resident needing to leave.
The predominance of single bed/ensuite accommodation being found in most new residential aged care facilities is perhaps being driven to an extent as much by market discernment as it is by 2008 Government Certification requirements.
The ‘house’ model with groups of private rooms (between 8 and 12) opening onto or closely related to a small common domestic living and dining room area with an open attached domestic kitchen is beginning to permeate into the thinking of high care operators. The pressure on the operator of old-stock residential aged care facilities, as the market demand lower occupancy rates per room is that they must either reduce their occupancy or intensify the density of their facility on its existing site. This pressure often strains the facility as renovations often undermine amenity, outlook and communal space and generally antagonises surrounding local residents.
An alternative solution, with the shortage and cost of appropriately sized urban sites and the growing desire by seniors to maintain existing links within a community is the reuse of obsolescent buildings for new seniors’ communities. This is rare in Australia, and not easy because of the specific planning requirements of aged care buildings, but has achieved some success in North America.
How is 2012 looking for you in terms of future work?
The development of Retirement Housing still tends to be very quiet at the moment and has been for the last three years. Some of the not-for-profit organisations are beginning to instigate some development, but the commercial sector of the industry is still quiet. We are documenting a large retirement development for an NFP, but this has been in the pipeline for a number of years.
Residential Aged Care has remained fairly consistent over the last few years, with a number of the not-for-profits taking advantage of the competitive commercial tendering climate to build new facilities. I suspect there will be activity in the extension and refurbishment of existing older facilities necessary to make them competitive with the recent batch of new aged care facilities that have come on the market over the last five years.
