Architectural Design by LM2A architects, Landscape design by Super Natural with Alice Ford.
Scales of Care
Reimagining Where We Live, 2024
As part of the Super Natural environmental design team with LM2A Architects, Alice contributed to Scales of Care, awarded First Place (Urban Metro Category) in the Australian Government’s Reimagining Where We Live design competition.
The competition brief invited designers to test the draft National Aged Care Design Principles and Guidelines through proposals for future-focused aged care environments.
Rather than treating the four design principles as separate or hierarchical criteria, Scales of Care reorganised them radially — holding each principle in cyclical relation to the others. Care was framed not as a service delivered within a building, but as a reciprocal system operating between individuals, community, and environment.
Alice’s contribution centred on diagramming the relational structure of care. The design introduced the positions of “me” and “you” — extending beyond carers and residents to include designers, assessors, and future occupants. The proposition acknowledged that all individuals will, at different moments in life, inhabit both roles: caring and being cared for.
Through this reframing, the project positioned aged care not as institutional accommodation, but as an evolving social ecology.
The jury described the proposal as:
“An exceptional proposition successfully designed as a dynamic connection between the individual and the community … a productive relationship between the practice of care and the environment in which it takes place … a positive feedback loop fostered between the resident and the world around them.”
Further information can be found via the Reimagining Where We Live Competition.
An interconnected relationship between outside and inside, carer (dark blue) and cared for (light blue) with other community members (a mixture of blues) both caring and cared for, Scales of Care by LM2A Architects and Super Natural studio with Alice Ford.
2024/05/17 Reimagining Where We Live
CATALOGUE : Archived
LOCATION : Noongar Boodjar, Western Australia
WITH : LM2A Architects and Super Natural Studio
this project is dedicated to my elders Carol, Jenny, Peter and Frieda