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Forget Me Not

Part 1 Project 2024
Victor Williams Salmeron
University of Kent | UK
Forget Me Not is an almshouse for former carers. It is a sanctuary, an archive and a community rooted in longevity, but constantly changing with time.

Great wisdoms are often lost within buildings of care, for their walls are told, felt and remembered under the metaphor of the hospital. It is a sterile, unwelcoming metaphor, one that has become the stagnant standard defining today’s architecture of care. Anthropologist Marc Auge describes this typology as the non-place – spaces in which we are only transient, to which we feel no sense of belonging to, and no sense of healing.

This project questions and contradicts the non-place, with an ontological approach, an anthropological and sacred space is created: one permeated by culture, narratives and memory. On the remains of a former Victorian chapel, the project builds upon ancient vernacular almshouse traditions: creating a symbiotic place of community and individuality, which cares for those whose care is only implicitly spoken of. Personality defines the space, the residency for once carers of a hospital remembers and reinterprets their familiar spaces. We see the corridor, the canteen, the ward, the hospital room: familiar spaces under new interpretations, with new poetries to inhabit them.

Victor Williams Salmeron

Tutor(s)

2024
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