What can living look like in old age? This is the question posed by young Munich architects Jana Wunderlich and Victoria Schweyer with their initiative pflücken, in which they trace places of remembrance. Architecture and old age – this is often a difficult combination, especially when it comes to one of the basic functions of living: creating a dwelling that […]
What can living look like in old age? This is the question posed by young Munich architects Jana Wunderlich and Victoria Schweyer with their initiative pflücken, in which they trace places of remembrance.
Architecture and old age – this is often a difficult combination, especially when it comes to one of the basic functions of housing: creating a dwelling that offers security and a familiar environment. A retirement home is often the last stage in a resident’s residential history, and relatives usually delay placement there for as long as possible.
But what does it take for a retirement home to be perceived as a place with residential qualities rather than the end of the line? And what should housing in old age look like? The two young architects Jana Wunderlich and Victoria Schweyer from Munich are addressing precisely these questions.
In their “pflücken” initiative, they explore the power of memory in architecture: Materials, textures, smells, colors – everything that makes up the atmosphere of a place that a person associates with fond memories. The name “plucking” serves as a metaphor for their approach, with the architects picking certain memories and arranging them in a colorful bouquet. This phenomenological approach forms the basis for workshops that Wunderlich and Schweyer organize in retirement homes. “What we do is a kind of participatory architecture, with the special feature that we work with old people. We believe that retirement homes as they currently function are not the right solution. To understand what the people there need, you have to be there and talk to them,” says Jana Wunderlich about her initiative. Victoria Schweyer adds: “Old people are often extremely interesting people who have seen a lot and from whom we can learn a lot.”
One example of this is the Caritas retirement home St. Franziskus in Munich’s Untergiesing district. There, the two architects sat down with the residents to talk about positive memories of personal places – and to derive an architectural intervention on site. They were supported by the home manager Michaela Stern and the social companions Martina Kiy, Leopold Föhringer and Dagmar Mühlhausen, who made sure that no one was left out or that none of the residents overexerted themselves. The residents then made drawings based on their memories.
At the same time, Wunderlich and Schweyer transcribed the associated narratives into short stories, such as the one from Bindergasse: “Every house has a bench in front of it. I sat on the bench because there was a lane running past our house. My uncle, where I lived, was a cooper, that was Bindergasse, so it was called the Binderhaus. When I sat on the bench, people who were going into the village always walked past. And then there was gossip. Everyone who passed by was gossiped about: sit down, have a chat.”
You can find the full article about the picking initiative in our current Baumeister issue 11/2019.
