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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Imagined bodies
— architects and their constructions of later life | | Author(s) | Christina Buse, Sarah Nettleton, Daryl Martin, Julia Twigg |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 37, no 7, August 2017 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press, August 2017 |
| Pages | pp 1435-1457 |
| Source | cambridge.org/aso |
| Keywords | Physical characteristics [elderly] ; Biological ageing ; Attitudes to the old of general public ; Architectural design ; Care homes ; Sociology, Social Science. |
| Annotation | This is a sociological analysis of how architects imagine the ageing body when designing residential care homes for later life, and the extent to which they engage empathetically with users. Drawing on interviews with architectural professionals based in the United Kingdom, the authors offer insight into the ways in which architects envisage the bodies of those who they anticipate will populate their buildings. Deploying the notions of 'body work' and 'the body multiple', their analysis reveals how architects imagined a variety of bodies in nuanced ways. These imagined bodies emerge as they talked through the practicalities of the design process. Moreover, their conceptions of bodies were also permeated by prevailing ideologies of caring. Although it was that architects sought to resist dominant discourses of ageing, they nevertheless reproduced these discourses. Architects' constructions of bodies are complicated by the collaborative nature of the design process, where there is an incessant juggling between the competing demands of multiple stakeholders, each of whom anticipate other imagined bodies and seek to shape the design of buildings to meet their requirements. These findings extend a nascent sociological literature on architecture and social care, by revealing how architects participate in the shaping of care for later life as 'body workers', but also how their empathic aspirations can be muted by other imperatives driving the marketisation of care. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-170721007 A |
| Classmark | BA: BH: TOB: YB3: KW: S |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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