Annie Bellamy is a second-year doctoral candidate at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. Following the death of her Mother at an in-patient hospice, her PhD thesis tentatively titled “Designing Dying Well: Toward a new architectural approach to the design of in-patient palliative care environment” explores concepts of dwelling and dignity in the human experience of environmental architectures that offer care at the end of life. Her thesis occupies a space between research and practice that is less explored in architectural studies. Drawing on her experiences as both ‘insider’ (from personal experience) and ‘outsider’ (as a design professional) she is exploring the experiential implications of institutional policies and standards of space. The drawings exhibited are part of a series of auto-ethnographic sketches drawn from memory used to illustrate the story of her time as an ‘insider’ when her Mother was receiving end of life care. These sketches are not traditional architectural drawings, drawn orthographically and to scale, but rather focus on the memory and experience of place. By giving these drawings equal evidential value to traditional architectural research methods, she is working towards developing a translation between the needs of ‘patient centred care’ and building standards for generic healthcare environments.
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The front door to my family home was as architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa muses ‘the handshake of a building’. The small step up being a subtle transition from the public to the private. Note the presence of a key box in place of house numbers – this marks the shift of our home being a domestic environment to care environment, needing to be fully accessible to community nurses.
The view from my parents' bedroom, where my Mother spent the majority of her time towards the end of her life (if she wasn’t in hospital). It wasn’t the most picturesque view, but the ‘short’ view allowed an extension of her life-world to the street outside, looking out over other houses and the streetlights.
My Mother’s life-world was afforded another generosity, in the form of another window seen through the door frame in the stairwell, and its proximity to the social life of the whole family house by being located immediately adjacent to the double height staircase and dining and living room below.
Unlike the subtleties of arriving ‘home’, arriving to the entrance of the hospice meant also arriving to one of the only places for families to sit together; this space was enclosed by the reception desk and the chaplaincy and family quiet room. A number of times I walked through looking for a place to sit and felt like an imposter, cruelly looking into the grief of other families sitting there. I am unsure if my Mother ever saw this space; ambulance’s had a different entrance to the ‘public’ entrance for the well-bodied.
The hospice was arranged like a racetrack and double loaded, meaning there were anonymous rooms on both sides of the corridor. However in two fleeting moments, a window provided a view out into the ‘communal courtyard’ a paved area with a number of planted beds. The window was too high up for anyone in a wheelchair or hospital bed to see out of. The doors that led out to it were kept locked. I, and most definitely my Mother, never saw the outside space.
This was the final tableau of my Mother’s life. She, in moments of lucidity, would have seen another hospital bed with blue anti-bacterial curtain and a suspended ceiling. We were lucky to not have had other patients in the room with us, and instead we did as much as we could to make her view of us, her family and of the natural world – moving a bird table and filling it with bird feed to encourage birds to visit. Distracting away from the constant hum of flickering fluorescent lights and the orange glow of the streetlights beyond.