AIAS/SAGE: Rethinking Home Design Competition

You never think it will happen to you. When in the prime of one’s life, in the peak of health, it is hard to imagine needing skilled nursing care. Yet with life expectancy rising and a record number of people approaching their senior years, it’s inevitable that some of us will require nursing home care as our circumstances change.

A Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF), also commonly known as a nursing home, is a designated structure or group of structures that employs registered nurses in providing 24-hour care to people who can no longer care for themselves due to physical, emotional, or mental conditions regardless of age. A licensed physician supervises each resident’s care and a nurse or other medical professional is almost always on the premises. Most of these facilities utilize two basic types of services: skilled medical care and custodial care.

This design competition challenges students to investigate an existing SNF and develop an original set of design standards for renovation and new construction to meet today’s use of nursing facilities while improving on aspects of living conditions and work environment. The developed program includes a set of drawings, general programmatic constraints and recommended space requirements for redeveloping a real life case study located in Florida.

Sponsored by S.A.G.E. and administered by the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS), the program challenges students to learn about skilled nursing home design, specifically the challenges of breaking from the model of staff-centric operating philosophies to resident-directed care. The winning designer(s) will receive $2500 for first place and be flown to San Diego for the 2010 Environments for Aging Conference to present their work.

Visit the competition Web site at http://www.aias.org/sage to learn more about the competition, download the program and site information and see what other prizes are available for winning designs.