Millefiori: Rewriting the Berber Fortress as an Open Community for Senior Living in Rabat

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Q: What is "Millefiori: Rewriting the Berber Fortress as an Open Community for Senior Living in Rabat" about?

This article covers topics related to Arabic Architecture, Modular Housing, Desert Architecture, Modern Architecture, Residential Building, Architecture. A co-living community for older residents in Rabat that keeps the fortress's sense of safety but runs a public street through its quiet courtyards.

A co-living community for older residents in Rabat that keeps the fortress's sense of safety but runs a public street through its quiet courtyards.

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UNI Editorial published Results under Arabic Architecture, Modular Housing on Aug 29, 2026

A fortress is built to keep the world out. Millefiori borrows the fortress anyway, and then cuts a street straight through it. That single move is the project's core argument: older people need the psychological safety of walls, enclosure and controlled thresholds, but they do not need the isolation that usually comes with them. The result is senior housing that behaves less like a care facility and more like a small, protected neighbourhood with its doors left open to the city.

Designed by Anna Sangalova, Dmitry Batanov, Алиса Смирнова and Андрей Мачуш for the Co-Life competition, the scheme is sited in Rabat, Morocco. The team starts from a familiar urban diagnosis: fast, dense and expensive cities erode the independence of older residents through high housing costs, traffic, pollution, inaccessible public space and loneliness. Their answer is a form of co-living adapted to seniors, where privacy, healthcare, recreation, nature and everyday social contact share one site, and where the architectural language is drawn from the fortified settlements of North Africa's indigenous Berber communities.

A Fortress That Keeps Its Walls but Loses Its Isolation

Rendered aerial view of arched white housing blocks with rooftop planting, palms and rectangular reflecting pools under a hazy ochre sky

Rendered courtyard view of arcaded white buildings, palms and a shallow pool, with elderly figures walking and sitting on cobbled paving

The aerial view makes the lineage legible: white, arched housing blocks gathered tightly around open ground, their roofs planted, palms and rectangular reflecting pools laid out between them. Traditional Berber fortresses protected their inhabitants through dense walls, controlled entrances, enclosed spaces and collective organisation. Millefiori keeps the density and the enclosure, so residents feel held by the buildings around them, but it refuses the closed perimeter.

At ground level the courtyard reads as a calm, shaded room. Arcades frame cobbled paving, a shallow pool cools the space, and elderly figures walk or sit without any visible staff choreography. This is the protected interior the fortress model promises. What makes it interesting is that it is only one half of a spatial pair: the courtyards sit against a central pedestrian alley that ties the development back into the surrounding city, giving residents the choice between retreat and exposure.

Courtyards Calibrated for Different Kinds of Ageing

Night rendering of the arcaded courtyard with glowing arch openings, lit fountains and two figures walking under a starry sky

The night rendering shows the courtyard at its most intimate: glowing arch openings, lit fountains, two figures walking under a starry sky. It is a quiet image, and quietness is a deliberate design condition here. The team's strongest conceptual claim is that older adults are not a homogeneous demographic. Some want highly social days; others want reading, meditation, gardening or rest; most drift between the two.

Millefiori responds with graded levels of social intensity rather than a single communal hall bolted onto private apartments. Wide pedestrian streets host walking, games and chance encounters, multifunctional areas take table tennis and gatherings, while courtyards, landscaped gardens, shaded corners and planted terraces offer withdrawal. The whole plan is organised as a gradual transition from private to semi-private, communal and public. That gradient is what allows the architecture to accommodate different personalities instead of prescribing one model of senior life.

Tile, Lattice and Terrace: Moroccan Identity at Close Range

Elevation drawing of an arched facade with blue patterned tile surrounds, a lattice screen panel and planted terrace at mid-height

Interior rendering of a shared lounge with a tiled feature wall, dining table, orange armchair and a long corridor beyond

The elevation drawing shifts the conversation from plan to surface. Arched openings are edged with blue patterned tile, a lattice screen panel filters one bay, and a planted terrace interrupts the facade at mid-height. Each element does double duty: the lattice moderates light and view, offering privacy without sealing a resident off, while the terrace pulls greenery up the building so nature is not confined to the ground plane.

Inside, the shared lounge carries the same vocabulary indoors. A tiled feature wall anchors a dining table and an orange armchair, and a long corridor recedes beyond. The room is domestic in scale, closer to a family sitting room than an institutional day space, which matters for a building type that so often defaults to clinical finishes. Cultural reference here is not ornament for its own sake; it gives residents a setting that feels rooted in Rabat rather than imported from a generic care typology.

The Central Alley as a Living Room at Urban Scale

Two renderings: elderly figures facing a distant arcaded block, and a narrow street hung with pennant bunting and a draped carpet balcony

The final pair of renderings captures the project's social spine. In one, elderly figures face a distant arcaded block across open ground; in the other, a narrow street is strung with pennant bunting while a carpet hangs draped over a balcony. That second image is the clearest statement of intent: a lived-in street where daily life spills out of homes and into shared space.

The designers treat the alley the way a traditional street works, as a place to meet, watch, exchange news, rest and shop, not merely to pass through. Bringing this inside the development means residents encounter one another while simply moving around, rather than depending on scheduled activities in enclosed recreation rooms. For a project addressing loneliness, this is the decisive move: social contact becomes a by-product of circulation, built into the architecture rather than programmed onto it.

Why This Project Matters

Senior housing is too often designed as an endpoint: a sealed facility optimised for care delivery and little else. Millefiori reframes it as a piece of city. By pairing the fortress's sense of protection with a public street, the team shows how security and openness can be arranged as neighbouring conditions rather than opposing ones, and how residents can choose between them hour by hour.

The project also makes a quieter case for regional specificity. Its arcades, tiled thresholds, lattice screens and planted terraces tie the scheme to Moroccan building culture, giving older residents an environment that reads as familiar rather than institutional. As cities everywhere confront ageing populations, a model that treats dignity, choice and everyday encounter as spatial problems, solvable through plan and section, is worth taking seriously.