Invisible Space, Visible Care — A Relational Attitude as a Societal Necessity

When I first encountered the term "care architecture," it struck me as heavy, vague, and morally trendy. It seemed like the showpiece of post-pandemic exhibitions and lectures, where architects could bask in societal relevance. I didn't attend—not out of disinterest, but because it felt like a form of self-legitimization rather than genuine engagement.

Today, I see it differently. Not because academic discourse suddenly became more convincing, but because care took on a face at the kitchen table. Parents wanting to share their home with their children or seeking a nearby place for their care-dependent daughter. No exhibition, no theory, but concrete life stories calling for proximity, autonomy, and space to live together without losing each other.

"two stories, one home"

From that moment, I understood: care doesn't belong in a separate architectural category. There is no such thing as care architecture; there is only architecture that cares—and architecture that doesn't. Every architect who assumes societal responsibility should design with care.

Care as an Attitude

For me, care in architecture isn't about wider doorways or accessible ramps—though these are essential. It's about an attitude: designing with attention to relationships, dependencies, vulnerability, and rhythm.

Care begins and ends at home. Our way of living—how we build, organize, and distribute—lies at the root of many problems: loneliness, housing shortages, care crises. We've become accustomed to a housing model where each family has its own enclosed unit, far from family or community. Autonomy became an ideology but turned into isolation.

There are alternatives. In other cultures, cohabitation is more naturally organized: multigenerational living, housing cooperatives, cohousing. Even closer to home, we know traditions of shared living: beguinages, monasteries. Perhaps it's time to dare to rethink that logic. 

As Halewijn Lievens states: "Care is not only made invisible; one could argue that it is to some extent even rendered superfluous by organizing living in such a way that people are better able to care for themselves and their loved ones."

Rethinking Living: A Practical Example

A project from my own design practice illustrates this. A 1970s tent house with a split-level structure—at first glance unsuitable for care-dependent individuals with mobility issues faced by the current residents. There are simply too many level differences that almost guarantee inaccessibility to various spaces. But alongside these challenges lies potential: two driveways, a spacious garage at garden level, separate access. The solution is a transformation into a multi-family home, a contemporary kangaroo house where the daughter and her family occupy the higher split-level areas, and the parents have their own unit on the ground floor—formerly the garage, with a small extension and no level differences. The daughter faces southwest—the street side; the parents face the garden: the northeast side. Each has autonomy, but there's also a crucial extra: a shared intermediate space.

Not a private space. Not a communal kitchen: a third place, a space nestled between the two, not fully appropriable, but also not noncommittal. A place for meeting without obligation. For proximity without suffocation. A space also used during family celebrations, or quietly on a random morning, or as access to the garden from the front of the house.*

The Third Place as Gentle Strength

This third place is not a corridor or technical interim solution. It's not a gadget from a handbook. It's the beating heart of caring architecture. A place that provides space for relational dynamics: space that moves with the need for proximity or distance. Sometimes that's an indoor room, as in the practical example; sometimes a garden path along a hedge with a bench under a tree near a care unit in the garden. These are spaces that don't prescribe but architecturally, this requires subtlety. Suggestions instead of rules. Structures supported by human interaction. There's only one rule I would dare to establish: these spaces must be work on a human scale.

Architecture as Gentle Structure

Caring architecture is not a typology or style. It's a way of working that starts from relationships. From listening to what's needed, in a specific place, with specific people. The third place is the externalization of that attitude. A fluid place, a gentle no-man's-land where care can emerge—without shame, without patronization, without a hero role for the architect.

In times of aging populations, loneliness, and growing social isolation, there's a need for architecture that dares to care. Not by paternalistically directing, but by creating space. For meeting. For freedom of choice. For proximity and distance.AWe don't design buildings. We design frameworks for living together. And if we do that well, even gentle structures can be strong.

Care is not a burden. It's an opportunity. Care is not a typology. It's an attitude that makes architecture visible.

Space that breathes.

Space that fosters care.

~Ar. Kimberly Wouters

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*The project is custom work and still a work in progress at the time of publishing this story.