There’s No Place like Home: Designing for Long-Term Residential Care in Canada

This article explores the architecture of long-term residential care (LTRC) design in Canada. Because choosing residential care over aging in place is widely perceived as a personal, social, and familial failure, LTRC is fraught with ageist connotations. Relatedly, chronic underfunding and low prestige make many LTRC buildings nearly invisible. Like hotels, university residences, and even summer camps, LTRC buildings try to look residential, but their functional programs are wholly institutional. We examine how these contradictions are legible in Canadian LTRC architecture, drawing on a fictional example—Joan Barfoot’s Exit Lines—that demonstrates how the real LTRC buildings we discuss are popularly understood. We also draw on an extensive set of ethnographic notes from a team-based research project for which members visited sites across Canada, with a promise of anonymity. We argue here that LTRC buildings fade into our neighbourhoods and cities (and even budgets), because their gestures to institutional and to suburban architectural vernacular traditions are unremarkable, but that they require attention precisely because of this uneasy ambivalence. We highlight a handful of Canadian buildings whose architects have broken the mould of LTRC design and offered fresh alternatives to argue that home might not be the only or even the best model for designing LTRC.