Cork will be launching an Exhibition of Age Friendly Housing Designs at Cork County Library on Monday 24th September.
Cork County Council sponsored a site in Bantry Town for a Student Project in the Cork Centre for Architectural Education (CCAE), UCC/CIT, to design an Age Friendly Housing Scheme. Age Friendly Projects look at housing designs, assistive living technologies, and social interventions to facilitate independent living; in spite of challenges brought about my growing older.
According to Age Friendly Ireland, research has shown that 80% of adults aged 55 and older were positive towards adapting their current home to allow them to remain living independently. 80% of those asked in the 2016 survey did not want to relocate to a nursing home. Age Friendly Housing and Living creates opportunities to explore a broad range of housing options available to older people, to enable them to live in accordance with their needs.
This is the second year that Cork County Council has engaged with CCAE on the competition; this year awarding two winning students with paid summer internships within Council’s Architecture Department.
Judging the proposed schemes were architects from Cork County Council’s Housing Directorate, the Chair of the Cork Older Persons Council, Ms. Liz Maddox, and the Cork County AgeFriendly Coordinator, Ms. Fiona Hayes.
The exhibition will be a fantastic opportunity to showcase innovative and unique housing designs that can adapt to their resident’s needs. Dr. Sarah Mulrooney of the Cork Centre for Architectural Education commented on the successful candidates’ projects saying: ‘Two schemes were chosen as particularly successful for satisfying the requirements of adaptable, lifetime, multi-generational, and energy efficient homes.’
The exhibition will be open and free to the public from the 25th of September to the 5th of October 2018 on the ground floor of the Cork County Library Headquarters.
