The intersection of ageing and a life that does not conform to tra ditional heteronormative structures requires forms of care beyond our existing provisions. At present, most caring facilities, spaces, services, and legal frameworks are structured around a highly limited understanding of “next of kin”. LGBTQIA+ collectives have long sought alternative communities and spaces of care that respond to other social realities. To give a response to the later life stages of homosexual co-living nuclei, single persons, transgender individuals, and other variations of non-conforming coexistence, self-initiated architectural projects have emerged in different countries. Switzerland is no exception, and local associations have been promoting buildings that look at care relationalities from a different perspective, transgressing traditional understandings of family, dis mantling binary understandings of care taking and care receiving, and fostering interdependencies and mutual care. Expanding on the work of these self-organised projects, this Master’s thesis programme will explore alternative caring spaces while understanding bodily dependencies as means to create posi tive kinships and ageing as a political condition. Ageing tends to be oversimplified, reducing the individual to a non-productive member of society. Often, elderly people are segregated within constricted spaces of heavily regulated care that impede self-determination on multiple planes. In the design process, we will look to the ageing body with all its potentialities, addressing its spaces, contexts, and rituals. The LGBTQIA+ community will be taken as an entry point to defy as sumptions and biases around models of care and collective living. Given these premises, we will seek architectural and aesthetic propos als that embrace non-normative relationalities and distributed forms of care at different scales, from the body to the city. 

The students will work on housing facilities with care infrastructures, both able to host members of LGBTQIA+ ageing communities and simultaneously respond to wider neighbourhood needs. There should be critical reflection on how LGBTQIA+ ageing experiences may differ from heteronormative ones, and what the spatial implications of these kinds of otherness might be. The project and its placement in the context should mirror, amplify, and reflect on existing provisions of care – or their absence, if this were the case –, in order to offer alternative scenarios from an understand ing of the urban context as an indispensable medium for care, beyond the confinement of the home. Recognising the current conflicted relationship between domesticity and care, or the also conflicted isolation of care or retirement homes, the projects need to be able to dismantle biassed constructs, ‘unworlding’ or, unmaking spatial dispositions of inequality and predefined architectures of seclusion. This process of redefinition and reorganisation needs to consider the present context in order to propose a construction that, while implemented at the scale of the building, operates at the same time in a transscalar manner, linking the body to the city.