DANDELION BY MIN-AI (ZOE) KUO

“Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.” 

Life after retirement never was a terminal station, but a brand new beginning to bloom on, laugh on.

In the wake of the promotion of public health, and improvements of medical equipment, population aging has been a global issue we are starting to face. 

To be more specific, in 2050, the aging percentage in Asia and Europe will be over 35%, including Taiwan, we are getting thorny to resist the condition. Under the circumstances of an aging society, there’s no way to reverse the trend, but we can carry out projects to indoctrinate the notion of “successful aging”, encouraging people to form a good habit of living on their later years. 

Heading on to your third life? Welcome to our long-stay village, Project Dandelion – Site Wulai. According to the satisfaction of the resource requirements for a long-staying site, I chose Wulai as a prototype to demonstrate the whole project. Wulai possesses the deepest aborigine Atayal culture, the natural hot spring and attractive sceneries. Not only located in the mountains, but located at an appropriate height, the surroundings blocking the wind, causing a comfy weather. To correspond to the four main points of how to age successfully, the goal of my project is to decrease the burden for the next generation; reorganizing a more appropriate space, keeping their body functioned and in health; remedy the retirees that are going through the empty nest period, and to focus on creating more interactions.

My design isn’t a module, but a pattern to adapt various sites with similar conditions, making a chain system for senior visitors to travel around. This leads to my concept, the life cycle of a dandelion, portraying senior visitors as dandelion seeds fluttering from one place to another, repeating the cycle of rooting in and sprouting out, the gradually reforming into a seed, continuing its third life to diverse lands, then on, the cycle goes over and over again.

In terms of location, my target customer splits up into two groups, the retired locals that are non-disabled or light disabled, and oversea visitors such as the Japanese or compatriots from Canada and the US. In terms of age, customers should be mainly experiencing the following three periods. The late parental period before retirement (50-65 yrs. old), after retirement (65 yrs. old and above), and singular individuals.

Unlike the long-stay buildings nowadays that are independent and a distance from the local tribes, to increase the interactions between neighbors, I claim harmful, scattered volumes, forming vertical connections right on top of the local housings, instead of dismantlement. Not to specialize the visitors, but to let them integrate into the village.

Satisfying different types of family structures, there are three forms of the lodging volumes, the single for individuals, the double for couples, and clusters for 4-5 people that tend to social. Emphasizing the connections and rooftops is the key point of my mass development. Since sewing is the representative feature of the Atayal, and to strengthen my concept of sowing the dandelion seeds, the “two sew/sows” have the same meaning of connecting and expanding the relations of people, this led me to a design of wrapped and circled circulations as the language of my project. The tilted roof tops are triangular Atayal totems, lying in four different angles to keep the triangular shape in sight from any direction.