Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Jeffrey Zhenhua Liu
Elder care exists in a state of perpetual precarity. Elder care facilities in the United States are consistently underfunded and understaffed, leading to neglect and elder abuse. In lieu of proper professional facilities, there is a growing shift towards residential elder care in which elders receive informal in-home care in private residential settings, placing unfair burden on family members to perform uncompensated care labor. As residential care becomes the dominant paradigm for elder care, new models of affordable elder housing must be developed to include elder care spaces within residential living. To combat the economic precarity and social isolation produced by privatized residential elder care, various models of communal care have been proposed in which elders and other community members gather together in common spaces, pooling resources and labor to help care for one another. Take Care was a second-year undergraduate studio at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo that invited students to design collective elder care housing for Los Angeles’s Chinatown. Though Chinatown’s aging population is underserved by a limited stock of affordable elder care housing, practices of co-living and spaces for mutual aid are deeply embedded into the history of the neighborhood. Thus, the studio prompted students to envision new paradigms of housing that integrate collective care within domestic space. As an introductory design studio, Take Care utilized the framework of unit-to-whole to instruct students in the design of housing as a composition of smaller spatial units. Through this theme of unit-to-whole, students reconceived the home in a collective form with private individual rooms and shared spaces where care takes place, investigating the proper relationship between individual and collective in their proposed communities of care. Ultimately, students envisioned models for elder care such as collective housing with common domestic spaces, multigenerational housing, and collective care as a reciprocal practice of mutual aid.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.113.63
Volume Editors
Sara Jensen Carr & Rubén García Rubio
ISBN
978-1-944214-48-7
