New Memory: A Color-Coded Medina Where Senior Living Becomes a Way of Remembering

Most elderly housing is designed to be efficient. Long corridors repeat identical doors, care routines dictate the plan, and residents are quietly moved to the edge of urban life. New Memory starts from the opposite assumption: that older people carry accumulated experience, knowledge and cultural memory, and that architecture should keep them in circulation. The project treats memory, color, nature and social interaction as building materials, and it organises them into something closer to a small city than an institution.

Designed by Meryem, the proposal was recognised as an Editor's Choice entry in the Co-Life competition. Its site is Temara, near Rabat in Morocco, and its spatial logic comes from the traditional Moroccan Medina. Courtyards, narrow streets, shared facilities, gardens and shaded thresholds are reorganised into an accessible framework meant to support autonomy and reduce isolation. Residents are not cast as patients. They are neighbours who remember, meet, teach, rest and keep participating in society.

A Medina Reassembled for Slower Footsteps

The Medina is a smart precedent here. Its dense fabric of courtyards and pedestrian lanes already produces what senior housing usually lacks: short distances, shade, chance encounters and a clear sense of territory, from private room to shared court to public passage. Meryem keeps that sequence and gives it the accessibility that historic medinas often do not offer, so residents get the social richness of the old city without its physical obstacles.

Read as a whole, the scheme refuses the single building. It reads as a cluster of linked environments in which kitchens, libraries, planted terraces and community spaces sit along the routes residents walk every day. Sociability becomes a by-product of movement, not a scheduled activity.

A Spectrum of Neighbourhoods, From Yellow to Green

The project's most distinctive move is chromatic. Taking the visible spectrum as its reference, the master plan arranges residential clusters in a gradual sequence of yellow, orange, red, pink, violet, blue and green. Each cluster becomes a recognisable neighbourhood within the larger development. Courtyard typologies that would otherwise blur together each gain an individual identity.

The point is not decoration. Color works as infrastructure for orientation, a kind of cognitive map residents can carry in their heads. For people whose memory or spatial awareness may be weakening, saying "I live in the blue court" is far easier than counting doors along a corridor. The idea extends to other cues the project names: a courtyard remembered for its vegetation, or a shaded passage tied to a daily routine. Wayfinding stops being a signage problem and becomes part of the building's atmosphere.

Choosing Between the Quiet Garden and the Busy Courtyard

New Memory does not prescribe one way of growing old. It offers a range of settings: quiet areas and animated ones, intimate gardens and collective courtyards, private rooms and shared facilities. Each threshold changes the atmosphere and the degree of social exposure, so residents decide day by day how much company they want.

That element of choice is the project's quiet ethical stance. Standardised care environments tend to strip away individuality and discovery. A plan full of variety gives residents back small daily decisions, which way to walk and where to sit, and those decisions help sustain independence.

A Humid Green Spine Between Mirrored Rooms

At the scale of the room, the axonometric shows three layouts organised around a teal humid band of bathrooms and plants that runs between mirrored sleeping areas. Placing the wet zones together in one shared strip is efficient planning, but the planting turns a service zone into something you can see and smell. Vegetation, moisture and light enter the most private part of the plan.

The band also carries the project's color logic down to the scale of the unit, so the same strategy that orients residents across the master plan reappears beside the bed. Consistency like this is what makes a cognitive map hold together. The room does not break from the neighbourhood; it continues it.

Why This Project Matters

Senior housing is one of the fastest-growing building types, and too much of it is designed as if ageing were a logistics problem. New Memory argues that the tools for supporting older residents already exist in vernacular urbanism: courtyards that gather people, lanes that shorten distances, shade that makes walking possible. Meryem's contribution is to combine those tools with a legible color system that serves orientation as directly as it serves identity.

The proposal still has open questions about care provision and how the clusters would operate day to day. Its core insight, though, travels well beyond Temara: a building that is easy to remember is easier to live in, and a community that is easy to navigate is easier to stay part of. For a competition about co-living, that is a precise and humane answer.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Meryem

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Project credits: New Memory by Meryem Co-Life. (uni.xyz).