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Amid the rising number of dementia patients, this proposal examines the relationship between architecture, music, and memory to speculate innovative ways to address the issue.
Parasitising the abandoned York Road Station, the programme combines and spatialises the premises of patient-specific music playlists and sensory gardens in an architectural promenade, deploying virtual space to stimulate the senses and evoke specific memories of a fictional protagonist's life. For its nostalgic connection to British architectural heritage, brick was chosen as the primary material – complemented by clay ornamentation, bridging tradition and innovation. The introduction of a proportional system based on musical notes and harmonies, which translated music into architecture dictated the scheme’s development. An interdisciplinary methodology combined hand-drawing, digital modelling, rendering, film, and musical composition. The project proposes less so the building itself than a system for generating space – virtual or otherwise – and a new niche in spatial practice. At the highest order, the project calls for the profession to embrace its greatest good – its ability to bridge the disconnected.
An allegorical, musically-proportioned, brick-based architectural promenade explores the intersection of music, memory, and architecture, to imagine a scenario wherein therapeutic virtual spatial practices can alleviate the effects of dementia.
From general arrangement to detailing, the entire scheme is a product of a proportional system based on the harmonies and wavelengths of musical notes. This system translated a biographical musical work into architectural form.
The film follows a patient’s procession through a virtual patient-specific architectural curation and its greenery, brick, and clay-based spatial conditions. The promenade is divided into movements, describing distinct epochs of one's life.
Inspired by The Caretaker’s "Everywhere at the End of Time", an album praised for increasing empathy for dementia patients, the final film portrays the spatially mediated recollection of a protagonist's life, followed by their forgetting.