Scelte funzionali, materiche e formali nella progettazione di residenze per anziani. Functions, materials and forms in design of housing for ageing people.

The last forty years brought profound changes into European families: declining birth, ageing, number of families increase and relative decrease of components number. These trends claim involved important transformations of household consumption structure, starting really from residential places. The numerical disintegration of large family happened also through “expulsion” and “isolation” processes of elderly components: the housing demand that derived from it has stimulated big attention of these topics with the aim to ensure structured offer directed to the comfort of third age. Until nineties, the request focused almost exclusively to housing for not self-sufficient elderly people; this has brought to the construction of structures similar hospitals typologies, with collective care services and large spaces in which focused cohabitation of several people. Otherwise, in the last few years, the maturation and the exasperation of the dynamics above described have brought to the housing typology essentially constituted of small apartments connected by common spaces, almost to create neighborhoods, in which also the most active people, full of interest and actions, could find favorable family background. The design of this building type, therefore, must be reserved the same attention to necessary conditions of privacy guardianship (intimacy, comfort, family environments, maximum comfort, etc.) and to those necessary of social relationship care, essential in life phase that tends to the isolation and the imprisonment. The contribution aims to prove, also through the presentation of international cases study like a requirement type of architecture design, developed in operational, spatial and of materials terms beginning from the needs and the necessity of senile population, could determine al effective combination of form and function.