A Forgotten Home.

There is a particular cruelty in how we have chosen to treat memory loss. When a person forgets, our instinct, architecturally, institutionally, culturally, has been to move them. Out of the house they raised children in, out of the street where they knew every turn, and into a facility engineered around efficiency, supervision, and risk management. We call this "care," but for the person inside it, it often reads as banishment. This thesis, “A Forgotten Home”, began with a refusal to accept that trade-off. Its central question is simple to state and difficult to design for: can a facility for people living with dementia still feel, in every spatial and sensory way, like home?

Why Kerala, and why now

Kerala is ageing faster than any other Indian state, and the numbers behind this project are not abstract. The state already carries the country's largest elderly population share, and dementia prevalence climbs sharply after the age of 65. Yet the region's few existing care facilities are rarely designed with dementia specifically in mind, they borrow hospital logic, not home logic. What makes this gap more urgent in the Kerala context is cultural: care homes here are still associated with abandonment, and families frequently feel guilt at the thought of institutionalizing a parent or grandparent. Any design response has to earn trust before it earns occupancy. That single insight, that trust, not just clinical competence, is the real design brief, shaped almost every decision that followed.

Designing backward from a stranger's routine

Before touching site or form, the project worked backward from the daily rhythm of a dementia patient: the disorientation of waking, the anxiety that peaks again at dusk (a pattern known clinically as sundowning), the fear of not recognizing one's own reflection, the wandering that isn't wandering at all but a sincere, urgent need to "go somewhere." These are not symptoms to be hidden behind locked doors; they are spatial problems with spatial answers. Lights are kept low but present through the night. Mirrors are minimized. Circulation loops back on itself so a resident who needs to walk can walk safely, indefinitely, without hitting a dead end that reads as failure or containment.  

 Borrowing from a typology that already knew how to hold a family

Rather than invent a new architectural language for care, the thesis looks to something Kerala has already perfected over centuries: the nalukettu, the courtyard house built around a central nadumuttam. Historic examples like the Paliam Nalukettu demonstrate exactly the qualities dementia care quietly needs, an introverted, protected core that still stays in constant contact with rain, light, and air; verandahs and padipurams that soften the threshold between private and communal; a spatial hierarchy legible enough that a person with a fading memory can still find their way by feel. Homeliness, this project argues, isn't a mood board of "warm materials." It's architectural coherence, controllable scale, and the ability to leave a personal mark on a space, the same determinants that make any house feel like your house.

A campus organized by stage, not by diagnosis

Dementia is not one condition experienced one way, it progresses through stages, and a resident's spatial and social needs shift dramatically between them. The masterplan reflects this directly: two residential quadrants split by stage, each with its own dedicated healthcare block, so that care intensity scales with need rather than forcing every resident into a single uniform environment. Four distinct Home Modules, from a compact, spousal-caretaker unit to the campus's largest 72-person cluster, let household size mimic something closer to an actual family unit than a ward. At the heart of it all sits a Community Tower, deliberately given the silhouette of a Kerala temple or church roofline, a civic and spiritual anchor that gives the whole campus a recognizable center, the same way a temple or a church anchors a village.

Materials as memory, not decoration

Laterite, timber, and Mangalore tile were chosen because they are what these residents grew up with, not for their texture, but for their familiarity. This same logic shaped a smaller, more intimate detail: doors, window screens, and floor tiles designed to be physically swapped and rearranged over time, letting a resident's environment evolve or be personalized without ever needing to relocate them. The idea behind this detail borrows from an old philosophical puzzle: if a ship has every one of its planks replaced over the course of a long voyage, plank by plank, is it still the same ship? There's no clean answer, the paradox exists precisely because identity doesn't live in any single physical part, but in continuity, in the sense of an unbroken thread running through the changes. That is exactly the bet this project makes with a resident's living environment. A door can be swapped for one with a different lattice pattern, a threshold tile can be replaced, a window screen can be interchanged, and yet the home persists, because what stays constant is the arrangement, the ritual, the sense of a space that is still recognizably one's own. In practice, this means a caretaker can adjust a resident's room in response to their changing needs, a new tile pattern near the bed to help with orientation, a familiar door motif brought over from a family photograph, without ever asking that resident to pack a bag and start over somewhere else.

What this project is really proposing

Strip away the drawings and the brief, and A Forgotten Home is an argument about dignity: that the loss of memory should not cost a person their sense of belonging. Kerala's courtyard vernacular already contains the DNA for this kind of care, communal, legible, deeply human in scale. This thesis simply asks architecture to trust that inheritance, rather than replace it with a hospital corridor.