1.5 ConEd Learning Hours
10:30 a.m.‐12:00 p.m.
This session presents two recent projects completed in the Metro Vancouver area that reimagine the use of the single‐family house lot. Each project introduces a unique form of co‐living and age‐friendly design with supports that also considers how the project site and occupants relate to the community as a whole.
The first project, Rosewood, is a home to provide culturally sensitive care for Japanese‐Canadian seniors. The spaces are designed to have a nice connection to the exterior environment and surrounding community. Through strategic organization and design, residents maintain independence and engage in daily activities, including cooking, laundry, and gardening, fostering a true co‐living experience that goes beyond traditional care blurring the line between caregiver and cared for. The second project, Rinkyo Laneway House, is an age friendly laneway house and site plan for a family of three generations to co‐live on the same property. The laneway house is designed with age‐friendly features to allow grandpa to live independently as long as possible. The building, along with the site plan, was designed to create a comfortable connection between the family and to the surrounding community. At their core, the projects aim to create environments that have a natural connection between the people that live, work, and visit there to nature, the neighbourhood, and the surrounding community.
Learning Objectives
1. Learn about experiential and functional strategies for age‐ and dementia‐friendly design implemented in a formal and informal care setting.
2. Learn about design strategies to create connections between residents without compromising privacy.
3. Learn about design and planning strategies for how to provide the necessary support infrastructure for naturally occurring retirement communities (NORCs), to allow people to age in the right place.
4. Learn about the regulatory and ideological challenges for creating mutigenerational communities within existing single‐family house neighborhoods
Eitaro Hirota, Architect AIBC, Principal
Eitaro Hirota Architecture
Eitaro Hirota is an architect and researcher based in Vancouver. He is Principal of Eitaro Hirota Architecture Inc. (EHA), and has more than 15 years of experience designing various forms of housing and commercial projects, with a specialization in seniors housing and age‐friendly and dementia‐friendly design. While at NSDA Architects, he was the lead architect for “The Village Langley,” a first of its kind dementia care community in Canada. Currently at EHA, he is engaged in several projects in Canada and the United States, which include several multi‐generational dementia‐ friendly communities, a culturally sensitive care home for Japanese seniors, a community‐oriented campus of care for seniors, and a six‐storey modular social housing project. Eitaro is also actively engaged in the community with his research, and through lecturing and giving presentations, and volunteer work at places such as the Robert Nimi Nikkei Seniors Home, which is vital part of his creative process—to make honest spaces that are empathetic and create delight and enjoyment for the people that use and inhabit them.