The House of Timefulness Hospice

313 Broadway Street, Cambridge MA

Unbuilt

Great architecture aspires to timelesness. Venerable monuments convey a transcendence that our bodies cannot begin to emulate. Ruins, on the other hand, are replete with time. They beautify the ravages of age in their patination and decay. In April 2023, the Faith Lutheran Church became a ruin when an arsonist set it alight. For almost two years, its ruins sat as an idle icon of destruction to the residents of Cambridge Massachussets. The House of Timefulness adaptively reuses these ruins to conjure a beautiful sense of timefulness for its residents.

The fundamental condition of hospice living is grappling with a scarcity of time. Nowhere is the temporal divide between our bodies and our buildings felt more poignantly than when we apprehend our mortality knowing our time is running out. The House of Timefulness, therefore, provides that which its inhabitants most sorely lack: the fullness of time. It does so through time-full, not timeless, architecture. Typically, alluring hospice designs forget this fundamental scarcity when their designers locate them in remote sylvan settings, far from the cities that house the vast majority of our aging citizens. Rather than extract more precious time from hospice patients who are forced to commute to the countryside in order to experience a peaceful senescence, our design brings the world and time into its urban spaces.

The spaces, forms, materiality and porosity of the building envelope are designed to heighten the experience of time’s endless cyclicality. William Cullent Bryan’s poem “Thanatopsis” captures the spirit of the architecure’s atmosphere: though the time for a hospice patient’s consciousness is dwindling, we will all be absorbed into the beautiful world we are never leaving, that is saturating every surface of the House of Timefulness. The patinated masonry walls ofthe Faith Lutheran’s ruins are preserved and re-animated: clerestory windows become portals into private spaces or seating nooks in the library. Each room and treatment area terminates in bay windows that look upon an internal garden stocked with plants that acentuate seasonality. Every interaction at the circular nurse’s station bisecting the nave is framed below a gingko tree, the base of which is encased in a curtain of falling water. The chapel occupies the original charred belfry, within which lush greenwalls creep up to a wood lattice dome that draws the eyes to an oculus where a steeple once stood. In the common areas of the converted nave, a grand glazed gabled roof clad in slate louvres incorporates the sky and all its vicissitudes. All the materials evoke a warm organicism: salvaged brick, gluelam arcades, weathered marble and corten steel wear time as an ornament. In the House of Timefulness, hopsice visitors are reminded that they participate in the beauty of a cyclical time that they will continue to enrich.

Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim

Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,

And, lost each human trace, surrendering up

Thine individual being, shalt thou go

To mix for ever with the elements,

To be a brother to the insensible rock

And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain

Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak

Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.

From “Thanatopsis” by William Cullent Bryan