Circular Living Morocco: Senior Housing That Lets the City Walk Straight Through It

Most senior housing is designed around a boundary. A gate, a reception desk or a fenced garden quietly tells residents that their active life in the city is over. Circular Living Morocco removes that boundary. It routes the paths of ordinary city residents directly through and around the complex, so that growing older happens alongside the daily movement of the street. The core idea is simple: if older people risk becoming physically present in a city while socially separated from it, architecture should put the city back within reach.

Designed by Dominika Kłopotek, the project was shortlisted in the Co-Life competition. It takes on one of the hardest questions in housing for older adults: how a building can support independence while reducing isolation. Kłopotek's answer treats circulation, shared activities, public interaction, private outdoor space and residential comfort as parts of one connected system, while still keeping protected areas where privacy, security and familiarity hold.

A Café as the Front Door, Not a Care Facility Lobby

The café interior sets the tone. Pale tables, grey and white chairs, a long banquette and yellow pendant lamps describe a room you would happily walk into from the street, and the figure carrying a bag reads as a passerby rather than a visitor signing in. That ambiguity is the point. The project's research frames aging in Morocco as more than a healthcare issue; it is tied to housing, mobility, financial independence, family relationships and access to social networks. A shared space that feels civic instead of clinical gives all of those networks a place to overlap.

The design also takes on a tension in traditional expectations of family care. Relatives often carry responsibility without professional experience, and older people can slowly lose access to public life. A café that residents, families and neighbours all use supports both groups without forcing anyone into an institutional routine.

Curved Balconies That Face the Street Rather Than Turn Away

The exterior view shows a white apartment block with curved balconies and trees on the roof. Pedestrians, a scooter and a hammock sit in front of an orange sun disc. The building does not retreat behind a buffer; it holds its edge to the public realm, and the balconies act as private outdoor rooms that look onto shared life below. This is where the project's urban circulation strategy becomes visible. City paths cross the complex on purpose, creating what the proposal calls controlled overlap between residents and visitors.

That turns circulation from a functional requirement into social infrastructure. A pathway becomes a meeting place, and an entrance becomes an invitation. The balcony is the resident's way of choosing their level of engagement: close enough to watch and greet, but still part of the home.

Keeping Familiar Routines Inside the Plan

The kitchen render is the most domestic image in the set, and arguably the most important. A narrow galley with timber cabinets, a marble splashback and a blue panel, a person with a dog by the window: this is a home, not a ward. Kłopotek's argument is that reading, cooking, walking, meeting neighbours and spending time outdoors are ordinary activities that have an outsized effect on how people experience where they live. Instead of replacing those habits with an institutional schedule, the plan keeps them.

The axonometric explains how. Cut-away rooms reveal the internal wall layout behind scalloped balcony edges, showing individual units arranged so each keeps its own outdoor threshold. The scalloped perimeter is more than ornament. It gives every dwelling a defined piece of the facade and stops the building reading as a uniform institutional slab.

From Desk to Gallery: Spaces for Learning and Teaching

The flat illustration of a room corner, with a trestle desk, stool, trailing plant, wall shelves, grid pinboard and coral vase, reads like a workspace rather than a bedroom. It reflects the project's insistence that residents keep taking part in social, cultural and economic life. Learning and teaching appear in the brief as everyday activities, and this corner gives them a home.

The gallery scales that idea up. Freestanding white walls with coral panels frame a woman holding a tablet in the foreground while another visitor moves through behind her. Exhibition space draws the wider community into the complex on cultural terms, so the reason to visit is the programme, not obligation. Here architecture works as an enabler of independence: the building supports participation instead of simply housing residents.

Why This Project Matters

Circular Living Morocco reframes the brief for senior housing. Most proposals in this category begin with bedrooms, healthcare functions, dining and corridors, then add social space if room allows. Kłopotek starts from the opposite end and asks whether senior housing can increase participation rather than reduce it. Running public paths through the site is a bold spatial move, and it is balanced by protected private zones, which makes the idea credible rather than naive.

The project is persuasive because its tools are ordinary: a café, a balcony, a kitchen, a desk, a gallery wall. None of them is radical alone. Arranged so that city movement and resident routines keep crossing, they produce a residential environment that belongs to the city instead of sitting apart from it. For a society rethinking how family care and aging fit together, that is a useful model.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Dominika Kłopotek

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Project credits: Circular Living Morocco by Dominika Kłopotek Co-Life (uni.xyz).