Elderly Space: Eye of the Memory Reimagines Care Through Biophilic Architecture

What if a building could remember on behalf of the people inside it? Elderly Space: Eye of the Memory takes that question literally, shaping a care facility in the form of a human eye and embedding it with technology that collects, stores, and projects the personal histories of its residents. The result is a circular glass pavilion that doubles as a community memory hub, broadcasting photos and recollections on birthdays, anniversaries, and memorials through an air projection system. It is part care facility, part archive, and part public monument to the lives of aging populations.

Designed by Nepeta Mii, this shortlisted entry to the Huddle competition is sited within Munich's Englischer Garten on a 4,746 square meter plot where over half the area is covered by trees aged 20 to 30 years old. The project draws on traditional Chinese pavilion culture and the communal habits of elderly residents who gather in public squares for dance, music, and storytelling, then translates those rituals into a contemporary, technology-augmented spatial experience.

A Circular Form That Grows With the Land

Seen from above at dusk, the pavilion reads as a luminous ring set into the forest canopy. The fully curved structure avoids displacing the existing green space, instead following the natural topography and weaving between mature trees. Tiered planted roofs step down from the center, blurring the boundary between architecture and landscape. The green roof serves a dual purpose: it provides thermal insulation to reduce energy loads while offering elderly users direct access to nature, a strategy rooted in biophilic design principles that have been shown to reduce depression and encourage physical activity.

The building is organized into three zones stacked vertically. A Service Centre occupies the first floor, an Activity Centre fills the second, and a Roof Garden crowns the structure. Rotating ramps connect these levels, and their surfaces are equipped with solar panels to minimize energy consumption. The circular plan and glass enclosure promote a sense of openness and psychological ease, allowing residents to maintain a constant visual connection with the surrounding forest.

Glass Facades and Cylindrical Columns Among the Trees

At street level, the pavilion's transparent walls dissolve the distinction between interior and exterior. Cylindrical columns support the two-story structure while maintaining sightlines through the building to the forest beyond. The glass facades are not just aesthetic gestures; they reinforce the biophilic agenda by ensuring that natural light, tree canopies, and seasonal changes remain visible from every corner of the facility. Semi-enclosed mobile spaces positioned along the perimeter encourage intergenerational interaction, creating settings where younger visitors and elderly residents can share meals, conversation, and stories.

The design accommodates a spectrum of care needs. Self-care elderly individuals who live independently share the space with those requiring professional assistance, and the programme is calibrated so that both groups benefit from communal dining areas, shared seating, and accessible pathways. The architecture does not segregate based on ability; it layers social encounters throughout the plan.

Memory as Programme: A 5km Radius of Collected Stories

The conceptual diagram reveals the project's most distinctive ambition: the architecture collects and stores memory-based data from within a 5km radius, transforming the building into a broadcast node for personal and communal history. Radiating wedges of text and imagery overlay the site plan, illustrating how the facility reaches outward into the surrounding neighborhood to gather the stories that will be projected within its walls. On significant dates, the air projection system displays photographs and recollections of residents, creating immersive digital storytelling moments that reconnect individuals and families with their pasts.

The concept draws explicitly from the tradition of elderly park culture in China, where public squares serve as stages for collective memory and social performance. Here, that tradition is given a technological infrastructure: ancient functions realized through modern techniques. The pavilion is not a passive container for aging bodies but an active instrument for preserving and sharing the cognitive and emotional life of a community.

Why This Project Matters

Elderly care architecture too often defaults to clinical efficiency, optimizing for supervision and hygiene while neglecting the emotional and social dimensions of aging. Eye of the Memory pushes back against that tendency by placing memory, storytelling, and nature at the center of its programme. The air projection system is a speculative technology, but the spatial logic that supports it is grounded: circular plans that encourage movement, glass walls that maintain connection to landscape, green roofs that serve both ecological and therapeutic functions.

What makes Nepeta Mii's proposal compelling is its refusal to treat the elderly as passive recipients of care. By designing a building that actively collects and broadcasts the memories of its residents, the project insists that aging is not a retreat from public life but an opportunity to deepen it. Sited in one of Europe's great urban parks, the pavilion suggests that the most humane elderly spaces are not hidden away but woven into the fabric of the city.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Nepeta Mii

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: Elderly Space -Eye of the Memory by Nepeta Mii Huddle (uni.xyz).