Retirement rethink: architect’s multigenerational co-living design an alternative to storing elderly far away and forgetting their needs
- Matthias Hollwich’s Skyler concept replaces ‘simulated reality’ of retirement communities with apartment towers for people of all ages who look after each other
- While this New Yorker reimagines Western model of old people living together, developers in China are importing it in face of social change, one-child policy
New York architect Matthias Hollwich was just 38 years old when he started thinking about retirement living. He was far from ready to hang up his pencil, but “in pre-preparation for my midlife crisis” he started to research what his future might look like.
“Everything I saw surprised me in a negative way,” said the German-born principal of Manhattan studio Hollwich Kushner.
The idea of age-based formulaic building design did not cut it for the now 48-year-old, even if the first step is the attractively packaged “lifestyle communities” for the over-60s. To him, options beyond that seemed even worse.
“Once you retire, especially in America, there’s a whole industry that pretends to take care of you,” Hollwich says.
“Retirement communities, assisted living facilities, nursing homes – all of these are areas where old people are being stuck together in one place to get them services. But it does not really support people’s wants, needs and desires, which have not changed [as they] get older. It’s basically life support, but it’s not really what life is all about.”
The irony, as Hollwich sees it, is that a retirement community used to be for the last five years of your life. “Now people live 10, 20, 30 or 40 years in these places. So, you remove these incredible people away from the day-to-day activities of society, and you store them in Florida and forget about them.”