Rising Ground
The new nursing home of Àrborg is conceived as a confluence of the landscape and the city – nature and architecture. Like a seismic fault line, the architectural crusts of the earth are lifted and mingled to form an underlaying continuous space of patios and rooftops, lookouts and overhangs. Rather than a single volume defining an interior and exterior, the building is conceived as a sinuous line that emerges from the ground delineating interior spaces and exterior gardens in a continuoum that oscilates between closure and freedom.
The apartments have 28 m2 and are defined with a grid of 2.40×2.40 meters. To allow a flexible organization and to accommodate different needs, the rooms are free of partitions, with the possibility of changing the position of the furniture. Framing the window there’s another shelving system with movable parts in order to change easily and transform it to a bench with a library or a desk with na closet. Some rooms have the possibility to combine into a bigger one thanks to the rotative closet that is hidden in the wall. With this solution, instead of having two rooms connected by a door, we merge the 2 spaces in a continuous and spacious apartment. The services and staff areas are all facing the hospital in a linear distribution to allow a good and easy circulation and a fast connection with the medical structure. The parking is redesigned: the access is on the same side as the existent but now it’s bigger to allow an easy drop in/off of the ambulances and public into the nursery. All the staff and services have separate entrances from the users and visitors. As the existing offices are in containers,, we decided to integrate them in the new building guaranteeing a separate entrance and its own courtyard. This decision permits the offices to be integrated in the new structure and being part of a more harmonious building complex.
