RESIDENCE FOR PEOPLE WITH FUNCTIONAL DIVERSITY IN MAR MENOR | Milena Villalba

Aidemar has been assisting many people who need guidance and help in the care of their relatives affected with some kind of functional diversity for a long time, with the sole aim of giving them a better quality of life. The great experience of this non-profit association, together with the progress of medicine, leads us to the point that concerns us: the great demand that exists for assistance services to users with very serious disabilities, together with the growth of the life expectancy of these people.

Having this backdrop as the project for this residence appeared, which we intended to be a home in line with the objectives of sustainable development and the promotion of healthy ageing.

Due to the requirements of the programme and facilities, the use of the building is typical of a health centre. Eventhough, one of our main concerns was  how to design a hospital without making it look like one.The residential area is made up of housing units or cohousing units for 8 to 12 people with double rooms and their own common spaces, so that the users can perceive the building as a house and a home, and not as a hospital.

From the competition phase, the programme of needs was studied and an attempt was made to use the architecture itself to enhance the personal and human facet with which the association itself treats its users.

Special attention has been paid to the cohesion of the different parts of the programme, their location, the study of the routes to achieve the maximum possible operability, the relationship with the surroundings and the place where the intervention is inserted (a very desolate architectural context resulting from a past so-called real estate boom); everything that architecture itself can offer people, but always subordinating it, that is to say, an architecture of content rather than of container for and by people.

The pieces of the programme are arranged to achieve lighting and ventilation around courtyards, achieving optimum climate regulation in a natural way, based on the ancestral configuration of our Mediterranean architecture.

This articulation based on courtyards allows centralising the administration and accesses next to the dining room on one side and the location of the workshops on the other; as well as serving as catalysts of comfort with cross ventilation, natural ventilation and textile elements of shade as passive

The pieces of the residential area are made up of independent units of four to six double rooms, each with a wet area, living room and storage area. These pieces are inserted along the pedestrian street, in the quietest area without road traffic; using the courtyards as a transition filter between the interior and the exterior: a sort of volumes skewed by courtyards are formulated, thus managing to fragment and domesticate the building in the residential area, "humanising", in a certain way, the housing pieces by understanding them as "dwellings" so that the users can attribute to themselves in their visual perception the quality of a home.

The presence of ceramic cladding, together with the installation of a gardening workshop as a cushion between the building and the exterior, gives the building an image closely related to the gardening and ceramic handicraft work that Aidemar offers its users in its therapeutic workshops. This architectural resource is used as a distinctive and identifying feature of the association itself: the users themselves selected the pieces that they make and, using a tile as a support, in a second firing with their own kilns, a border was made that encloses the whole building.

This, together with a large-format mural also created by the users themselves, makes the ceramics acquire a great emotional value: more than a highly technical material, the historical and/or cultural qualities of the ceramics themselves manage to establish a very personal and intimate relationship between the architecture and the people who live in it.