The conceptual design of the Local Activity Centre combined with the Daily Care Home for the elderly in Katowice

Silesian University of Technology, (Politechnika Śląska), Faculty of Architecture, Gliwice

Project idea

The subject of this work is the conceptual design of the Local Activity Centre combined with the Daily Care Home for the elderly, located in the city of Katowice. The aim of the project is to create a public space in order to prevent the isolation of elderly and multigenerational integration of the local urban community, present mainly in the close centre point of the city.

Project description

The building complex is made up of four segments corresponding to different purposes: A- Local Activity Centre, B- sports hall, C- Day Care Home and D- representative pavilion. LAC is a building with service and catering functions. It includes an entrance area with communication around an atrium with greenery and a viewing footbridge, as well as classrooms, a cafe, administrative and social rooms with technical, utility and sanitary rooms located around the communication core. Functions LAC It is complemented by a free-standing representative pavilion with an audiovisual room that can be divided into two smaller parts, intended for rent by external entities or for the organization of special events. It contains technical and social rooms serving it. It is accessed through two opposite entrances connected by a corridor leading to the sanitary facilities. All occupational spaces present in the Local Activity Center and the representative pavilion have been prepared with a view to social participation of future users in the operation and adaptation of the building's functions to their changing needs through the ease of arrangement and diverse topography of the rooms.

The Daily Care Home is divided into two parts: a noisy part with rooms for group activities, a dining room with an open kitchen, administration and technical rooms, and a quiet part arranged around a green atrium, with rooms for individual rest, health and social assistance rooms, as well as sanitary facilities, economic, technical and social rooms. The buildings of the Local Activity Center and the Daily Care Home are connected by a sports hall that broadens their program offer and consists of two large rooms: a dance class room and a gym, as well as a fitness gym with a table tennis room. The whole is serviced by technical, utility and sanitary rooms located in the north-eastern part of the buildings and located mainly on the ground floors of the each of the parts of the building complex.

Technical information

Each of the elements of designed building complex uses a frame structure made of reinforced concrete columns, giving the building users the opportunity to freely change the interior arrangement if necessary. The columns are spaced on an irregular grid with spans between 3m and 12m. The columns are supported by monolithic, reinforced concrete girders adapted to the span between the columns in the proportion of 1:10.

The structure of the representative pavilion rests on a reinforced concrete, monolithic foundation slab with a thickness of 20 cm, reinforced with foundation spurs under structural elements. The construction of the building complex (consisting of the Local Activity Centre, a sports hall and a Day Care Home) is based on a reinforced concrete, monolithic foundation slab with a thickness of 15cm, reinforced with footings under the structural elements, due to the use of a stepped footing due to the lower foundation depth of the DCH building.

The buildings of the complex have double-layer walls made of ceramic hollow bricks and insulation with EPS150 polystyrene, with the exception of the curtain walls of the internal atriums, the representative pavilion and the viewing footbridge, where glazed curtain walls were used. The facades of the curtain walls from the side of the courtyards with greenery were designed as walls, faced with wooden facade panels with a vertical arrangement with a detail made of facade boards with a cross-section of 5x10cm to emphasize the vertical divisions of the facade and the presence of public spaces with greenery in the vicinity of the building. The remaining facades of the buildings, together with the preserved facades from the previous buildings, were covered with a uniform silicate-silicone plaster.

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