Manon Bigler

Through a series of walks, conversations and workshops with a group of ‘elderly’ living in Oerlikon — facilitated through volunteering work at a local care home — this master thesis shifts the perspective of designing spaces for the elderly towards an embodied method of designing withand through the actual experience of ageing. A manifesto summarises the main spatial desires, experiences and imaginations of the consulted group, tested out in the design of an intergenerational housing block on the MFO-site, structured around five central design decisions or ‘twists’. The project aims to counter the invisibility of the ageing population in Neu-Oerlikon by giving intergenerational living a prominent space in the future development of the MFO-site, while challenging the stereotypical understandings of the spatial needs and opportunities that come with growing older.