Healing
by Design
There
is no known cure for Alzheimer's Disease, the most common form of
dementia in the elderly. Many people believe that Alzheimer's is
untreatable. But John Zeisel, LF '71, says that is not true. "It's
just that the major treatments are non-pharmacological," he explains.
Zeisel runs a group of assisted-living centers for Alzheimer's patients
under the name Hearthstone Alzheimer Care. When a new resident is
admitted to one of his facilities, any pharmacological constraints
are actually reduced during the first month, because the aim of
Zeisel's treatment is to enhance patients' quality of life, partly
through the design of what he calls "healing buildings."
When Zeisel neared the end of his graduate studies in sociology
at Columbia in 1970, he knew that he wanted to do applied research
in the design field. His goal was to answer the question, "What
is there about people that can be taken into account to improve
design for people who have no voice, such as students in schools,
poor people in low-income housing, patients in hospitals, or workers
in offices?" The search for an answer led him to a book by Herbert
Gans called The Urban Villagers, about a community in the West End
of Boston (today the site of upscale apartments with a sign that
needles, "If you lived here, you'd be home now," on a particularly
congested stretch of Storrow Drive). "It was a wonderful place,"
recalls Zeisel, "a low-rise, urban ethnic area like the North End,
where there were lots of Italians, but also Poles and Jews." Zeisel
and a colleague decided to design an ideal building that would reflect
the needs and values of the community described in the book. The
result was published in Architectural Forum, which led to an |
invitation
to give a lecture and a small, hands-on, studio class at the GSD.
Eventually, he was offered a spot in the first class of Loeb Fellows.
Though Zeisel had led a course in the planning department at Yale
and had taught architecture informally at Columbia and McGill, he
still knew very little about architecture or design, he says. He
spent his Loeb year immersing himself in studios, essentially trying
out his ideas for applying concepts to design. While a fellow, he
successfully applied for a three-year grant to perform behavioral
studies in design, allowing him to stay on as an assistant professor
at the GSD. This work led to a textbook in the field of environment-behavior
research called Inquiry by Design, which explores how sociological
research and design can be collaborative.
Zeisel has applied his thinking about that intersection to a variety
of problems, from finding design solutions for the control of graffiti
in schools to collaborating in the programming and design of a newspaper's
newsroom and a supermarket-chain's headquarters. ("Programming"
is the design term for finding out the needs of an organization
and its people before creating the building in which they will operate.)
He has written several guidebooks on low- and mid-rise elderly housing
for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and one on
Congregate housing-a precursor of today's assisted living-for retirees
and others. He programmed and jointly managed the design of the
first congregate elderly-care house in Massachusetts. And for the
last five years, he has been applying his specialty to the field
of Alzheimer's care, with demonstrable success. |
