Architectural Design Of Nursing Homes In The Era Of Aging

The21st century is the era of an aging population. At present, all the developed countries of the world have entered the aging society while a lot of developing countries are about to enter the aging society. China’s aging population now becomes the largest one in the word since it entered the aging society in1999. China’s elderly population accounts for one fifth of the global total, which has already attracted the eye of the world. According to our country, due to the successful implementation of family planning,"4-2-1" family structure (i.e., four elderly people, two young men, one child) had a rapid development and "Empty nest"-old people increased dramatically. What’s more, the lack of social pension institutions and facilities causes the pension to become a striking problem. Development and integrity of the social pension system is imminent. It is an important social mission to give the elderly a safe, comfortable pension environment. With the community’s concern and national investment, the cause of social pension has made a considerable progress. Some large nursing home has basically meet the needs of the elderly, but there still exists big problems in other nursing homes located in small and medium-sized or economically underdeveloped areas. In the latter nursing homes, the elderly’s basic needs can not be satisfied because of the imperfect facilities and monotonous environment. From the point of view of architectural design, this thesis aims at satisfying the physical and psychological needs of the elderly and coming up with a full-featured nursing home which is more humane and more suitable for daily needs of the modernelderly. Through access to information at home and abroad, the study compared the development history and current status of the nursing home. And then we obtain the first-hand information of contemporary older persons’needs by way of scene interviews and questionnaire survey. On the basis of full understanding of the physiological characteristics and the psychological characteristics of senior people, this paper comes to an overall study of nursing home in respect of the urban environment, the nursing home environment and the single built environment. In the nursing home study of architectural design, we made a specific design for the elderly living space, activity space and resting space on the basis of user-friendly design, fully-integrated with the model scale of their body and the physiological and psychological characteristics. In The respect of the nursing home outdoor environment’s layout, we investigated the outdoor space, green land scape and plant configuration respectively. Lastly, we made a thorough study at the user-friendly design and accessible design for the elderly. We hope to put forward a reasonable solution for the domestic nursing homes’existing problems with analysis of cases at home and abroad and learning from good foreign pension experience.This paper committed to achieve a harmonious society where elders enjoy independence and entertainment, to construct a functional and diversified elderly’s residential building, to care about the elderly and meet their daily needs following the spirit of "people-oriented".