Sol on Park Featured in FastCompany
The excerpts below are from:
How to design homes for life well beyond 100:
The senior housing industry is starting to plan—and build—for a much older future.
by Nate Berg, FastCompany
Rendering of Sol on Park
The world is getting older. By 2050, the global population of people in their 80s will be three times what it is today. According to the Stanford Center on Longevity, half of all the 5-year-olds currently living in the U.S. can expect to make it into their 100s. Harvard Medical School aging researcher David Sinclair suggests that the first person to live to age 150 has already been born.
It’s too early to predict all the ways that longer lives will change society, but at least one industry is starting to make some guesses. The developers, designers, and operators of senior housing are thinking about and planning for how these demographic shifts will affect their businesses and the services they provide.
To get ahead of the curve, some are designing their facilities for people who will technically be seniors for more than 40 years. They’re learning from communities around the world where people tend to live the longest and reconsidering the golf courses and bingo halls that were once central leisure activities. They’re also trying to design features that enable people to be healthy and active as long as possible…
The design of senior dwelling spaces is also being rethought. Sol on Park is a 200-unit affordable senior housing project expected to open in 2027 in New York City, and the developers behind it have focused on creating diverse spaces throughout. The studio apartments will be compact in size, but architect Brian Loughlin of Magnusson Architecture and Planning says they’ve been designed with alcoves and nooks that offer a bit more variety than a typical boxy studio.
“Especially as people are aging in place longer, they’re going to be spending a lot more time in these units,” Loughlin says. “So we’re not thinking of this as a 5- or 10-year solution but potentially a 20- or 30-year solution. How do we bring as much quality into that space as possible?”
Loughlin says the design also focuses on spaces that might easily be overlooked, like hallways. Small recesses are being added to each unit’s front door to break up the monotony of the hallway and create a small personal space where residents may interact. The design also adds large windows and small gathering spaces at the end of each hallway to give residents a view and an area for the kind of casual neighborhood interactions that might otherwise happen on the sidewalk.
“It’s a nice opportunity for people to connect with their neighbors and the neighborhood around them,” Loughlin notes.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently named social isolation and loneliness key risk factors for declining health in older adults. That recognition has underscored the importance of building social space into housing meant for that demographic. At Sol on Park, the idea goes beyond the simple community rooms or clubhouses that exist in many senior housing projects today.
“The old model was really tight [residential units] on top of one common room at the bottom,” Loughlin says. The Sol on Park design interprets community space more broadly, scattering it in various shapes throughout the 15-story building.
“We tried to really layer those spaces in, so that folks don’t just take the elevator up and down but . . . think I can get off on the fifth floor and go to the terrace, or go to the roof and see the garden,” Loughlin says. “It’s almost like a vertical neighborhood.”