The Pandemic Effect by Blaine Brownell

Author:Blaine Brownell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press

The Small House Model

Alexis Denton

There is an urgent need to redesign senior living communities to be smaller and more engaged.

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Purpose-built senior living communities offer older adults the promise of a safe environment with social and cultural engagement opportunities. These environments house residents with vastly different needs along the continuum of care. For some, senior living is a choice; for others, a necessity. The quality of the environment varies greatly across the industry—the better communities function and feel like all-inclusive cruise ships; the worst, like warehouses. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the core promises of safety and engagement these environments provided were challenged by the fast transmission and severe out- comes in the older, often-frail population living within.

COVID-19 was felt most acutely in skilled nursing facilities (commonly referred to as nursing homes), where the most vulnerable residents live. In traditional skilled nursing, it’s common to have shared resident rooms within interior neighborhoods that house forty to sixty people. These environments are typically sterile and institutional, resemble hospitals more than homes, and are overcrowded. A different model of skilled nursing facilities, the Small House model transforms an institutional environment to one that is residential and more in keeping with a typical, single-family home. In these Small House models, residents live in households of six to twelve people in private rooms with direct access to shared living, kitchen, and dining rooms. In addition, they operate with a small, dedicated team of caregivers—this is a crucial element for reducing the transmission of infectious diseases. As a result, this model had significantly lower transmission and death rates than traditional skilled nursing facilities during the pandemic.

As a result of the Small House’s success in keeping residents safe during the pandemic, other levels of care—notably memory care, assisted living, and even independent living—are transitioning to smaller scale, flexible-living environments. Instead of a cruise ship with large-scale centralized commons spaces that encourage many people to share the same area, the new model enables multiple hubs of smaller-scale decentralized commons that can change function as outside forces dictate. For example, a living room can transition into a small-scale dining room when it isn’t safe to dine in large settings. Likewise, large- scale apartment buildings are broken down into smaller pods with their own entrances/exits. These function more like villages or pocket neighborhoods within a building. Additionally, outdoor spaces adjacent to each pod expand those common areas and serve as outdoor rooms that are purposefully designed to be enjoyed during every season.

In this approach, residents can isolate themselves safely with a small group of others during a pandemic or other disaster, lessening the risk of social isolation and its physiological effects. This approach creates a variety of social scales between private and public, functioning more like a city made up of distinct neighborhoods. There are more social spaces between the living unit and large-scale gathering spaces. Ultimately, the single “cruise ship” becomes a series of villages that make up a larger community.

The enduring design responses to COVID-19 aren’t necessarily new to

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