3RW Arkitekter and Nord Architects’ design for Oslo’s Furuset Hageby creates a micro-environment where  people with dementia are gently encouraged to lead active lives As dementia progresses, lines begin to blur. The past and the present meld together and fragment. The place you thought you were a moment ago is no longer where you find yourself. There is confusion and sadness, sometimes even anger, before it all begins again. Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia are conditions that affect more than memory and cognition – they also cause disorientation and ‘visuospatial’ difficulties, diminishing patients’ understanding of how things interrelate in three‑dimensional space, with serious implications for safeguarding and general wellbeing.  Such conditions pose architectural challenges unique in healthcare infrastructure. The response, in the past few decades, has been the emergence of the ‘dementia village’. As Annmarie Adams and Sally Chivers observe in their 2021 e‑flux essay ‘Deception and Design: The Rise of the Dementia Village’, this new typology of care ‘is a direct counterpoint to the uncaring institution, the traditional nursing home, and its long list of much maligned architectural features – the car‑dependent entrance, double‑loaded and crowded corridors, identical rooms, enclosed courtyards’. Instead, the dementia village seeks to create an enclosed and perambulatory environment shaped around the specific visuospatial needs of those with diminished cognition and memory.  Furuset Hageby in Oslo, designed by Bergen‑based 3RW Arkitekter and Copenhagen‑based healthcare specialists Nord Architects, is the latest addition to this typology. The word hageby, meaning ‘garden city’, provokes images of low‑rise housing units flanked by tree‑lined streets and lush meadows. The centre is in fact located in a rapidly expanding neighbourhood typical of Oslo’s outskirts, and currently abuts an enormous construction site, dust‑filled and noisy with heavy machinery in the process of erecting a huge apartment complex. This area is a hotspot of activity for the municipality – alongside the new housing, the dementia village neighbours a brand new school, and across the surrounding sports fields, there are kindergartens and playgrounds abuzz with activity.  On the day of my visit, Furuset Hageby was marking its first anniversary. I was met by Helge Lien, a representative of the client Omsorgsbygg, a branch of the municipal property developer, Sykehjemsetaten, which is tasked with building care homes and other healthcare facilities in Oslo. ‘We would like the local community to take part in the life here,’ says Lien of the location. ‘We want to invite kindergarten children to take part in activities, and for the local residents to use the roof garden to grow vegetables and plants.’ ‘By contrast to a fenced facility, the village itself creates the boundary in Furuset Hageby’ You enter the village through its green administration building, one of what the architects call ‘special houses’. Inside is a bright, double‑height space with windows facing into one of the interior courtyards, where people walk past as if window‑shopping on a high street. There are three special houses – the green administration building, a red cultural centre and a shiny, glass greenhouse – each with its own visual identity. Together, they create a subtle hierarchy and variety of building types that emulate what you might find in ordinary small town centres around Norway.  The village structure has found its own Norwegian flavour in this project by employing a specific type of rural urbanity. Historically, small agricultural communities were built around tun, meaning a dense cluster of buildings that shelter the inner communal areas from the elements. The tun form a sort of cityscape in miniature, with a main thoroughfare and alleys running between the dwellings and specialised farm buildings. Here, the function is sheltering a vulnerable user group from the surrounding world rather than farmers from the whipping rain. ‘Of all the dementia villages we have seen, this one is the most village‑like,’ says Sixten Rahlff, principal architect at 3RW. ‘A lot of traditional dementia homes reuse a building and put a fence around it, to make patients safe within that setting. Here the village itself creates the boundary.’ To be within this care facility properly is also to be outside, in the courtyards and along a step‑free ‘green loop’ that runs on top of the roofs of the lower buildings. As the terrain of the site sits on a slope, the character of this perambulatory route shifts from urban, surrounded by buildings on all sides, to a gradually more green, natural and lush setting. As the building mass steps down below the pathway, the views open towards the surrounding neighbourhood, parkways and sports fields. This was the main reason the project won the competition, Rahlff explains. The sloping site allowed the buildings to terrace downwards, and the rooftops to make way for the walkway, which always leads patients back to the same spot.  This simple idea behind the green loop symbolises a lot of the intention in the conceptual thinking around the project as a whole, providing the cognitively impaired patients autonomy and freedom, while simultaneously avoiding situations that might create discomfort or confusion in the first place, such as suddenly finding yourself at the end of a corridor or pathway, without any memory of how the dead end was reached. ‘In conventional nursing homes, patients move in when they are so old and sick that they are physically unable to take care of themselves,’ notes Johannes Molander Pedersen of Nord Architects. ‘But at a dementia centre, patients’ physical state may be good.’ The opportunity to move about is beneficial to the residents, and encouraged. Dementia patients are an incredibly diverse patient group. The youngest inhabitants at Furuset are in their thirties, housed in a special division for younger patients. At present, this group is a minority here, but you would be forgiven for assuming that their presence had a bigger part to play in the design than it does, as so much of the project is centred around activity. When pleasant and safe outdoor areas are available at all times of day, and when going for a walk in the spring sun is not something that has to be arranged a day in advance, the health benefits multiply tenfold. This appears to bear out quantitatively too. In its first year in operation, staff at Furuset Hageby have observed a decline in the need for certain medications, says head of Furuset Hageby, Anne Gry Neby. ‘The freedom that the concept of living gives the residents allows physical activity throughout the day,’ she explains, ‘and we are observing less use of antipsychotic and sedative medications for patients compared with before moving to Furuset Hageby.’ Researchers from Oslo Met are currently studying the effect, and will report their findings at a later date. ‘Staff have observed a decline in the need for certain medications since moving to Furuset Hageby’ At all scales, and inside and out, effort has been made to disguise the centre’s institutional programmes. The common social areas, such as the bar and restaurant, the library and the common rooms of the different dwelling units are warm, intimate and homely. Natural materials and colourful surfaces counteract the aesthetic effects of the mandatory fittings and trimmings of a healthcare institution. Corner and wall protectors and hygienic ceiling systems are in constant negotiation with the concept of the home, which is what Furuset is ultimately meant to be. Here they have found a gentle middle‑ground. The dementia village is ‘purposely anti‑medical’, Adams and Chivers suggest. ‘That is, medical care is disguised.’ According to a recent study published by The Lancet, cases of dementia are expected to triple globally by 2050, and as our understanding of the disease grows, it becomes increasingly clear that the current standard of care does not sufficiently meet the needs of patients whose condition is far more complex than merely that of ageing bodies. Furuset Hageby, coming to the end of its first year in operation, approaches its users with both care and determination, and points the way forward in the continuing process of finding better ways to care for this rapidly growing patient group.