Co-life: A Senior Living Neighbourhood Built From Moroccan Craft, Riads and Berber Form

Most housing for older people is designed around what residents need to be protected from. Co-life starts from what they still have to offer. The proposal does not see ageing as a reason to withdraw from public life. It frames old age as a stage that still needs purpose, social standing and daily participation, and it asks architecture to provide the settings for all three. The result reads less like a care facility and more like a small town, assembled from the arches, domes, courtyards and saturated colour of Moroccan and Berber culture.

Designed by Kamilla Mukhamedzianova and selected as an Editor's Choice entry in the Co-Life competition, the project weaves housing together with gardens, healthcare, traditional crafts, recreation, commerce, religious spaces and community facilities. Its central question is a direct one: what if senior living could preserve identity and everyday purpose, and not only comfort and safety?

A Masterplan That Reads Like Folk Art From Above

Seen in plan, Co-life resembles an abstract piece of Moroccan folk art. Each zone has its own strong colour, geometric pattern and sculptural volume, and courtyards, gardens and pedestrian routes stitch the pieces together. The references are deliberate: bazaars, carpets, pottery, traditional vessels, babouches and hand-worked geometric ornament. Mukhamedzianova uses them to organise space, not to finish surfaces. The palette and patterning turn the plan into a legible map, so each part of the neighbourhood carries a distinct identity.

Legibility matters a great deal in this programme. A plan that residents can recognise and remember supports independent movement, and a visual language rooted in familiar cultural memory makes the place feel inherited rather than institutional. Here the decorative ambition has a practical job to do.

Mixing Programmes So There Is Always Somewhere to Go

The project's sharpest argument is programmatic. Conventional elderly housing often provides a dwelling and basic services, then cuts residents off from the rhythms of the surrounding city. Co-life treats social inclusion as an architectural requirement. Dwellings sit beside places for trade, crafts, worship, healthcare, education, gardening and recreation, which gives residents reasons to move through the site, run into neighbours and practise the skills they built up over a lifetime.

This mix turns a set of housing units into a social ecosystem. Craft workshops and commercial spaces matter most in this respect. They let older residents produce and teach, not only consume care, and that quietly restores the social status that institutional housing tends to remove.

Arches, Domes and Windcatchers as a Family of Houses

The housing forms grow out of a careful study of North African building types: ksars, Berber dwellings, desert houses, windcatchers, galleries, arches and riads. Mukhamedzianova transforms this vocabulary rather than copying it. The traditional arch develops into dual arches, vaulted houses and curved openings. Roof profiles are pushed through top insertions, double insertions, domes, pyramidal forms and hybrids that pair domes with more angular geometries. Air shafts and windcatcher principles generate a further family of forms.

The outcome is variation within a shared grammar. Each housing cluster gets a recognisable silhouette, which helps residents identify home, while the common lineage keeps the neighbourhood coherent. It is a sensible way to avoid the monotony that so often marks large-scale senior housing.

The Riad as a Model for Shared Life

Of all the typologies studied, the riad carries the most weight. Its inward-looking organisation offers a model for how private dwelling and collective space can sit close together, letting residents choose between retreat and company without leaving home. In Co-life, this logic extends from the single house to the scale of the cluster, where courtyards act as the intermediate rooms between personal life and the wider neighbourhood.

That gradient from private to communal is precisely what senior living needs to get right. By borrowing it from a typology residents may already know, the proposal makes sociability feel natural rather than programmed.

Why This Project Matters

Co-life argues that the problem with much elderly housing is isolation, and that more care alone will not fix it. By folding healthcare into a dense mix of craft, commerce, worship and gardens, the project presents ageing as continued participation. That reframing is relevant well beyond Morocco, wherever ageing populations are being housed in buildings that keep them safe but keep them apart.

The project also shows how cultural heritage can work as design method rather than ornament. Mukhamedzianova uses arches, domes, riads and bazaar colour to generate plans, forms and social structures, and in doing so she gives residents an environment that reflects who they are. For a building type so often defined by anonymity, that sense of identity may be the most important thing architecture can offer.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Kamilla Mukhamedzianova

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: Co-life by Kamilla Mukhamedzianova Co-Life (uni.xyz).