Green Mosaic: An Intergenerational Garden Community in Temara That Treats Landscape as Care

Most elderly care architecture begins with a quiet act of subtraction: older people are removed from the street, the family table and the rhythm of ordinary life, then housed somewhere efficient. Green Mosaic refuses that premise. Its argument is that the best support for aging is not a facility but a neighbourhood, one where grandparents, children, caregivers and young residents share the same gardens, shade and chores. Here, the orchard is as much a part of the care model as any bedroom or clinic.

Designed by Misak Terzibasiyan and Anna Wikiera, the proposal was recognized as an Editor's Choice entry in Co-Life. The site sits in Temara, near Rabat, within an urban fabric that is still taking shape. The designers saw in the plot the chance to hold onto a substantial green space while the city densifies around it. They drew on a Moroccan tradition in which seniors have long lived with children and extended family, sharing knowledge, responsibilities and daily routines, and they set out to keep that relationship intact rather than replace it with institutional care.

A Sunken Courtyard That Pulls the Garden Down Into the House

The opening view sets out the project's spatial logic. A pink arcaded courtyard drops below a planted lawn, and palms and citrus trees root the space while a visitor walks along the glass edge above. The section does real work. The upper ground remains a continuous garden, and the lower courtyard becomes a sheltered room carved out of the landscape instead of a building surrounded by it. The glass edge keeps the two levels in visual contact, so someone resting in the arcade stays aware of movement overhead.

This inversion reflects the designers' central claim that landscape, not built mass, is the primary organizing element. Vegetation is not a buffer applied after the plan is fixed. It is the ground from which the rooms are excavated.

An Orchard That Doubles as a Social Contract

Residents water, dig and wheel plants through rows of citrus and date palms in front of an ochre arcaded wing. The scene makes the proposal's most persuasive point: cultivation is shared work, and shared work produces community. The planting palette of palms, olives, citrus, rosemary and thyme is rooted in local culture and daily life, so the garden is familiar territory rather than an imported amenity. For older residents, gardening offers movement, routine, responsibility and a natural reason to talk with neighbours. For younger ones, it is a setting where knowledge passes between generations without a formal programme.

This is where the project's definition of sustainability turns social. The designers treat long-term support, belonging, accessibility and meaningful relationships as measures of performance alongside ecology. The orchard serves all of them at once: productive infrastructure, climatic protection, communal space and an everyday source of sensory experience.

Arcades as Thresholds Between Rest and Play

The next two views show how the arcade moderates the pace of the community. In one, sand-coloured arches frame a sunlit courtyard where elderly men rest on the grass while others walk the gravel path beneath date palms. In the other, an arched passage opens onto a tiled courtyard with planters, as a child runs past and a man climbs a set of steps. Together they capture the coexistence the project is after: slow and fast, sitting and moving, old and young, all in the same shaded frame.

The arcade is a deliberate choice. It draws on Moroccan spatial traditions, offers shade in a warm climate and creates an edge where people can linger without fully stepping into the open. For a mixed community that includes multigenerational families, couples caring for parents, seniors caring for grandchildren and older people living independently, these in-between spaces matter. They allow encounters to happen by choice rather than by schedule.

A City Block Composed Like a Tiled Floor

The site plan reveals where the name comes from. Bounded by three avenues, the block is set out as a grid of paved plots, tree canopies and coloured pools, closer to a mosaic than a conventional housing layout. Each tile can be a courtyard, a planted field or a body of water, and their repetition across the block produces a dense ecological fabric that still reads as urban.

The grid also explains how the project expects to grow and adapt. Because no single building dominates, the community does not organize itself around a central institution. Care is spread across the plan, in courtyards, orchards and shaded routes that everyone uses, rather than concentrated in one place reserved for one age group.

Why This Project Matters

Longer life expectancy and changing family structures are forcing cities everywhere to reconsider how they house older people, and the default answer remains separation. Green Mosaic offers a credible alternative grounded in place. By drawing on Moroccan household traditions and on longevity research such as the Blue Zones, which the designers cite as a conceptual influence, it treats intergenerational living as a spatial problem that architecture can address directly through shared ground, shade and daily tasks.

Its lesson reaches beyond Temara. The project shows that landscape can be the structure of a community rather than its decoration, and that a garden tended in common can hold people together as effectively as any programme of activities. In proposing architecture as infrastructure for mutual care, Terzibasiyan and Wikiera reframe the question from where the elderly should go to how everyone might stay.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Misak Terzibasiyan, Anna Wikiera

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Project credits: Green Mosaic by Misak Terzibasiyan, Anna Wikiera Co-Life (uni.xyz).