Fi Rrihlath: Scaling the Moroccan Riad into a Senior Living Community Built Around Movement

Most elderly housing is planned as a destination: a place residents arrive at and are then cared for. Fi Rrihlath, Arabic for "In a Journey," refuses that premise. It treats later life as something still in motion and builds a community where walking, meeting, learning, exercising, reading and working sit alongside medical assistance instead of being displaced by it. The project's recurring phrase, "an endless voyage," is meant literally. Circulation is the main spatial event of the scheme, the thing that gives it its character.

Designed by Ashwin Pradeep, Albin Mathew, Susan Kurien and Sagarika Sreenivas, the proposal received the People's Choice Award in the Co-Life competition. It occupies a roughly square site of about 40,202 square meters in Rabat, near the junction of Avenue Mohammed V and Avenue Moulay Rachid. Residential, educational and commercial activity surrounds the site. The team reads that context as an asset rather than a threat. Their organizing device is the most familiar inward-looking form in Moroccan domestic architecture: the riad.

A Courtyard House Enlarged to the Scale of a Neighbourhood

A traditional riad gathers rooms around a planted courtyard, often with water. It gives its occupants privacy and a calm interior shielded from the street. Fi Rrihlath keeps that logic and enlarges it until the courtyard becomes a monumental central lawn. The plan view shows concentric ring-shaped terraces around it, with oval openings, planted beds and small pools punctuating the green. Housing, healthcare, recreation and public amenities are arranged around this core, so the plan reads as a set of nested rings rather than a scatter of separate blocks.

The dusk rendering shows why the move works. Horizontal window bands wrap the circular terraced building, so every room faces the same shared centre. The riad acts as both destination and compass. Wherever residents are in the development, the centre pulls them out of their rooms and back toward communal life. For a population that can easily become disoriented or isolated, a single legible focal point helps people find their way, and it also draws them into company.

Circulation Built for Lingering

The designers argue that senior living should not be reduced to a repeated loop of bedroom, corridor, dining room and clinic. Their answer is a system of wheelchair-friendly spiral pathways and ramps, one of the project's most distinctive elements, which they treat as social space rather than infrastructure. The night view of a curved residential block beside its walkway shows how close private rooms sit to the paths of movement. A resident can watch activity from a window or step out and join it.

The gallery interior pushes the idea further. Curved stepped seating rises under round skylights that cast beams of light across the stone tiers, making a room for performances, talks or simply sitting in good light. The galleries, libraries and gathering spaces scattered along the route reward slow walking, which is the kind of movement this population needs.

Open at the Edges, Protected at the Core

The master plan depends on a careful gradient between openness and privacy. The team identifies the nearby neighbourhoods and educational institutions as chances for residents to take part in a wider community, so public circulation runs through the development. The residential zones sit deeper within the site and stay protected. The aerial view of the sloping grass courtyard, with its oval openings and a cloud-shaped lawn holding play equipment, suggests a ground plane meant to be shared across generations, not fenced off for one age group. That is a bolder stance than most care facilities take. It treats contact with neighbours and students as part of wellbeing.

A Health Centre That Sits Within Daily Life

Healthcare is placed close at hand without taking over the scheme. The rendering shows the health centre in rammed earth, with a cantilevered volume and a glazed corner, set behind palms and wet paving. The earthen walls tie the building to the ground and palette of the wider site, so the clinic reads as one more building on the journey rather than an institutional annex. This matters for a project that wants to support both independent and assisted living. Medical care is present and reachable, but it does not set the tone of the place.

Terraces, Water and Shade for Gathering Outdoors

The outdoor rooms carry the riad's courtyard qualities into open landscape. Curved stepped seating terraces, ringed by planting and a timber deck, face a sweeping balcony wing, while tensile canopies filter the low sun. In the second view, fabric canopies stretched on arcing steel ribs float above a shallow pool in front of an arcaded courtyard wing. Water, shade and enclosure, the riad's elementary ingredients, are rearranged here for a crowd rather than a household.

These spaces suit a population whose comfort depends on shade, seating and short distances. The stepped tiers let people take part at whatever level of energy they have that day, from active participation to quiet observation at the edge.

Why This Project Matters

Fi Rrihlath matters because it rejects the idea that old age is a holding pattern. By organizing a 40,202 square meter site around a single enlarged riad and threading it with accessible spiral ramps, the designers turn the most ordinary act in a care setting, getting from one place to another, into the main source of encounter, orientation and pleasure. Accessibility here shapes the architecture from the start instead of being added at the end.

It also shows how a regional archetype can be used as a working tool rather than a decorative reference. The riad gives the scheme its privacy gradient, its focal centre and its climate-minded courtyards, while the deliberate openings to Rabat's neighbourhoods and schools keep residents part of the city. The People's Choice recognition suggests that a wide audience responded to the same thing this editorial does: a vision of senior living as a place to keep moving.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Ashwin Pradeep, Albin Mathew, Susan Kurien, Sagarika Sreenivas

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Project credits: Fi Rrihlath by Ashwin Pradeep, Albin Mathew, Susan Kurien, Sagarika Sreenivas Co-Life (uni.xyz).