Redefining Retirement

Redefining Retirement 
By Colleen O'Malley

According to a survey by The Associated Press, “most baby boomers (Americans born between 1946 and 1964) expect to retire around age 63. However, 66 percent of the respondents expect to work for pay after retiring”. This jaw-dropping number is not high because Americans are postponing retirement because they are being forced to, but rather because they want to. This fundamental shift is reinventing and redefining the definition of retirement to fit today’s society. ABC News writers, Lisa Stark and Megan Carpenter, explain that “baby boomers have reshaped what it means to grow older. Compared with their parents, boomers are healthier, better educated and living well into their 80’s and beyond. The increasing lifespan has given boomers the chance to reinvent themselves and pursue new passions at any age. The quality of life the new retirees are looking for needs to be catered completely different now.

As people are independently changing, so is architecture. Architecture will have to adapt to the increasing needs of the baby boomers by the lifestyle they choose to live. How is retirement going to transform multiple infrastructures that already exist today? What impacts will this bring to society and the future? How will the daily lives of people be changed or affected? What really defines the type of individual aging now and how do they, as a whole, impact architecture?