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RIBA + VITRA TALK: NURTURING SPACES: DESIGNING FOR DEMENTIA

OCTOBER 2022

RIBA + VitrA Talk: Nurturing Spaces: Designing for Dementia

On the 4th October at London's RIBA Níall and Yeoryia Manolopoulou will present the Losing Myself project, a time-based drawing they collaborated on for the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, which represented the plan of a building as it may be experienced by different people with dementia. Also talking will be Frank van Dillen, founder of DVA Dementia Village Associates, who will present on the very first Dementia Village in The Hogeweyk in The Netherlands. The talk can be viewed here.

This talk is part of the RIBA Well Being : Well Built series, sponsored by VitrA Bathrooms. 

BIENNALE ARCHITECTTURA 2018

JUNE 2018

Biennale Architecttura 2018

The 2018 Venice Biennale opened to the public on the 26th May. This year’s theme “focuses on architecture’s ability to provide free and additional spatial gifts to those who use it and on its ability to address the unspoken wishes of strangers”.

Our contribution is a collection of six large-scale models, each representing a hall for gathering that the practice has designed. These models are placed upon a rotating table which is a calendar and a cosmic machine. Each hall has a different purpose yet they all bring people together in a rhythmic and cyclical fashion daily, weekly and annually. The specific uses of each building are regulated by a calendar of events, rituals and times of congregation. Their calendars are inscribed on the outer rim of a turning table. The table can be rotated by hand. When you turn it, varying light falls upon the models representing the passage of the sun through the day from dawn to dusk. It is a manual and mechanical process.

The intention of presenting these models in this way is to emphasise the relationship between the enduring frames of the buildings and the endless procession of fugitive elements that pass through them periodically.