There’s No Place like Home: Designing for Long-Term Residential Care in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".