Landscape of care: care center for people with mild to moderate mental health conditions

Authors’ Comment

Landscape of Care proposes the adaptive reuse of a former andesite quarry in Colibița as a care centre for people with early-stage and moderate mental health conditions. The project begins with understanding care as a process that unfolds over time, one that is not limited to medical treatment but is built through the relationship between the individual, space, and the environment he inhabits.

The former quarry is not understood as a degraded territory that needs to be repaired or restored to a condition prior to extraction. The excavated rock faces, terraces, and spontaneous vegetation are accepted as part of the identity of the place. The site is already undergoing a process of transformation, in which the memory of extraction coexists with natural regeneration. The project takes this incomplete condition as its starting point and seeks to establish a reciprocal relationship between two processes unfolding simultaneously: the regeneration of the landscape and the recovery of the user. Neither aims to return to an initial state, but rather to find a new equilibrium.

Architecture is understood as an infrastructure of care. It cannot directly treat psychological suffering, but it can create the conditions in which recovery can take place: control over the degree of social interaction, the possibility of withdrawal, intuitive orientation, and gradual transitions between spaces with different levels of privacy. Recovery is not considered a linear process, and the project avoids imposing a single mode of inhabitation. The user can move between introspection and participation according to their own rhythm.

This relationship is translated architecturally through two modes of operation: the tectonic and the skeletal. The tectonic belongs to the mineral mass of the quarry. Spaces embedded in the rock provide protection, control of light, and a direct relationship with the materiality of the site. The skeletal appears through lighter, independent, and reversible structures that attach themselves to the existing quarry faces and open towards the landscape.

Between these two conditions lies the threshold, understood not as a rigid boundary but as a space of transition. Level changes, passages and circulation routes create a sequence of moments in which light, materiality, and the degree of exposure gradually shift.

The landscape does not function as a background. Spontaneous vegetation is preserved and supplemented, while natural processes continue to shape the site after the intervention. In this sense, the project does not attempt to provide a final scenario for the quarry, but rather to introduce a new stage in its evolution.

Landscape of Care therefore proposes an architecture that does not seek healing through form, nor the isolation of the user within a protected environment, but rather the creation of the conditions in which one can gradually rediscover a personal rhythm and a relationship with the world. Care becomes a continuous relationship between body, architecture, and landscape.