But that is exactly what it looks like - instutitional. It has the very same layout as Barlinnie prison.

Hard to gauge much from that view; seems like it has potential, but without engendering much faith. Potential for some long corridors in those wings.
Buff brick is always a cause for circumspection. As is aluminium cladding.

@ UR: Good that you're including links to planning apps but would be handy if you could download and post a few more images and plans with your items. Perhaps you were planning to anyway but had to get the exciting news item online asap!! Maybe.

@Stephen - I've added another couple of angles.

Given that what the designer/architect experiences can never be what an 'inmate' experiences (cf. R.D. Laing and the Politics of Experience) , this is simply lacking in any 'structural' and 'familiarising' and 'homely' expression of each (i presume) 12-room unit?

Instead, what we have here is a design by 1970's cost yardsticks by any other name where everything is homogenised through the mincing machine of the accountant.

Is this good enough? Do we care in the slightest? I would suggest, no, and apparently not.

This design is no more than a factory for dying in. It's precisely the same architecture as for factory-farmed chickens. The architecture is effectively pro-dementia.

A society that produces this drek simply has to hold up its values to a light to see how devoid of any humanity that they are.

What we are being asked to believe here by the architects is that there are some of us 'out there' who would wish to seriously spend the last five years or so of their lives day in and day out for c. 1,800 days in a place such as this?

Apart from the usual smart-ass replies, I'll wager not one of those responsible for this abomination would wish to stay here, let alone be able to justify why they would wish to live in a place such as this.

SOS.

Is having 3 identical courtyard environments a good idea for people more likely to have some form of Dimentia? Genuinely interested to know if this is the case. Anyone know?
Calling the architecture prisonlike is a bit polite.

#4 - away and lie down in a dark room. Honestly the hysteria and hyperbole that's uttered by you lot on these comments sections is amazing.

#6 - To the voice of death masquerading as 'reason', other than your outrageously original and absolutely withering slap with a wet fish, have you actually got anything to say about this prison design? If not, I'd suggest you bugger off then, or go back under the rock whence ye came.

Come on now, it's not a prison is it? But i think you know that, don't you? Très drôle.

The design won't win any prizes, but surely you're intelligent enough to understand that there are a many number of limitations to this type of architecture/design/project? Like it or not, these projects are on extremely tight budgets, squeezed in every direction and driven by those who favour the feeling of having more money in the bank than the feeling that Corbusier gives them down below.

The design could (and should) be improved. It's uninspiring architecture and sad to see, as every design should be a thing of beauty in it's own right and this is not.

But alas we don't live in a pompous architect-driven world now, do we? Oh how good that would be, eh? We could all tuck in each others turtle necks and recite quotes from our favourite pretentious architecture and sociology books. We could pontificate and slag off all that is wrong in the world because, as architects, we know best and those pesky muggles don't know what's good for them.

Now wouldn't that be great...

Bonne soirée.

I'd say having 3 identical courtyards is a good thing . The dementia patients firstly won't have access to them all I imagine, these are normally unit specific but if they did find themselves there then at least they will recognise they are in a garden...

You know what? Just stick to the Daily Mail.

The thought did occur to me though that the logical conclusion to the above design and supporting arguments is that we really should just cut the mealy-mouthed crap and house the aged and dying and geriatric in converted boats moored in rivers just like prison ships. That really would save us a packet and a huge wrangle into the bargain.

I don't think you actually read the point of my argument. It was about human values.

I am not interested in beauty, i am interested in the possibility of adopting a different 'structural' approach to how communal living for the elderly within care homes (for that is what it amounts to) are arranged, organised, managed and set up. This organisation/structure would then express itself significantly differently physically without reverting to typical prison/sanatoria/hospital typologies.

You clearly have no idea what architecture actually is.

Your rhetorical last paragraph just gives you away for what you are - A total supercilious eejit.

@ 10. There's a lot of venom round these parts and more than a little truth in comment 6.
Thanks UR for the extra images. Assume no plans easily available. I'm too lazy to look at the application.

Please untwist your turtle neck and refer to comment #6.

Well VoR, just tell me why you personally would like to spend your last years on earth within this building and we'll leave it at that then?