intervention between a retirement home and a school, Hasselt Belgium
A new care campus is being located right next door to an existing primary school. On the border between the garden of the old people’s home and the school playground, there is the unique opportunity to facilitate informal contact between the generations.
Creating a meeting place is also a way of responding to the need for - and the search for - ways to tackle the isolation of elderly people in a residential community.
The intervention seems to imply that it was there before, prior to the new building’s completion, as a residue of earlier construction and an allusion to the rural nature of this area in the still recent past. The typical improvised Belgian ‘back-extension architecture’ looks familiar. A small conservatory, a rabbit hutch, a chicken run and a few canopies to provide shelter balance each other out on a piece of the garden that has been left ‘wild’, where chickens and rabbits have free rein. At the same time, the whole setup behaves like every artwork, as a strange element in this place; a precarious spatial composition of blue planes and volumes.
