Liesbeth Melis
Concern for demented fellow human beings in architecture and art

According to a Health Council report, the number of patients suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease in the Netherlands will have doubled by 2050. This means not only many more nursing homes, but also an enormous increase in nursing staff. Although the Health Council and the Alzheimer Foundation have sounded the alarm, society is illequipped for this ‘old age time bomb’. There is as yet much too little money and too few dedicated and trained staff. The latter is particularly worrying since care is becoming more and more intensive. In recent years psychiatric nursing homes for the elderly have been concentrating much more than previously on the patients’ perceptions of their environment. This so-called ‘experience-oriented care’ is personal and emotional and is connected to the person in both a sociological and a historical sense. According to Liesbeth Melis we see in the architecture and interior of the nursing homes that the spatial design and typology is taking these developments more often into account and is perhaps even stimulating them. Art too is searching for ways to improve the living conditions of a growing group of residents who are in danger of falling outside society but who, just like anyone else, have a fundamental right to spend the last years of their life in a dignified way.