Riad's: A Shortlisted Co-Life Entry That Scales the Moroccan Courtyard House into a Town for Elders

Most elderly care buildings answer one question well: how do you supervise and serve many people efficiently? Riad's asks a different one. What if later-life housing felt less like an institution and more like a living town? The answer it gives is spatial rather than programmatic. Instead of a single block with corridors and a common room, the project builds a dense settlement of homes, courtyards, gardens, pedestrian routes, workshops and gathering nodes, all organised around the oldest idea in Moroccan domestic architecture: the house that turns inward to a garden.

Designed by Mohamed Abdellatif, Serkan Taş and Tuğçe Gül Yanar, Riad's was Shortlisted in the Co-Life competition. The team frames senior living around community, familiarity and independence, and draws directly on Moroccan and Moorish spatial traditions to get there. The result is not accommodation for older people so much as a neighbourhood they continue to inhabit, with all the movement, commerce, visitors and chance encounters that implies.

A Courtyard House Stretched to the Scale of a Settlement

The aerial view makes the core move legible at once. Earth-toned blocks with planted roofs step around a central plaza of palms and olive trees, and the whole composition reads as a cluster rather than an object. A traditional riad places rooms around a protected void, gaining privacy, shade, natural ventilation and a daily relationship with vegetation. Riad's keeps that logic but repeats it, so that the void at the heart of one house becomes the organising principle of an entire community.

This is a sharper idea than it first appears. Conventional care facilities tend to centralise services and supervision, which quietly separates residents from ordinary urban rhythms. By borrowing a typology built for families and everyday domestic life, the designers sidestep the institutional vocabulary entirely. The plaza is not an amenity added to a care building; it is the town square of a place where people happen to be older.

A Public Plaza That Invites the City In

Under a white tensile canopy, residents gather on circular benches wrapped around trees, on a floor of irregular flagstone. The scene carries one of the proposal's most consequential strategies: the deliberate opening of the development toward its surroundings. Public areas are intended to attract visitors, which brings different generations into contact with residents and softens the hard boundary that usually rings an elderly residential complex.

That openness reverses the default relationship between care architecture and the city. Rather than protecting residents from urban life, the plaza positions them inside it, as observers, hosts and participants. The canopy and tree benches matter here: they provide shade and places to sit for long stretches, which is exactly what makes a public space usable by people who may walk slowly or rest often.

From Doorstep to Square: A Graded Sequence of Courtyards and Alleys

The ground-level views show where the project does its most careful work. A flagstone path crosses a gravel courtyard between pink walls and timber balconies; elsewhere a narrow alley threads between layered blue and cream rammed earth walls toward palms and a planted bed. Small groups of rooms overlook intimate gardens to form identifiable residential clusters, and these clusters connect outward to larger gardens and communal spaces. The courtyard stops being a stylistic reference and becomes social infrastructure.

The hierarchy gives residents a choice. Someone can sit just outside their room, meet a few neighbours in a small courtyard, walk on to a larger garden, or continue into the central public spaces. Private, semi-private, communal and public space follow one another without forcing anyone into a single mode of social life. The narrow, shaded alleys also recall the medina street, a familiar urban grain that keeps walking routes short, legible and pleasant to use.

Low-Rise Blocks Built Around Balconies and Thresholds

The elevations and sections confirm the scale of the proposal: four facades and two cross sections of low-rise housing blocks, punctuated by balconies. Keeping the buildings low holds the settlement close to the ground and to the courtyards it frames, so that upper rooms still look down onto shared gardens rather than out over them. The balconies act as a further threshold in the sequence, a place to watch the life of the courtyard without having to enter it.

This is where the riad's inward orientation earns its keep. Each block negotiates between retreat and exposure, giving residents privacy behind thick walls while keeping them in visual contact with neighbours below. For older people whose mobility may change over time, that ability to participate from a doorway or a balcony is not a minor detail; it is what keeps a community within reach.

Why This Project Matters

Riad's argues that ageing should not automatically mean withdrawal from society, and it makes that argument through spatial organisation rather than slogans. By scaling a domestic typology into an urban one, the designers show how a care environment can keep offering chances for curiosity, learning, making, meeting, walking and contributing. The architecture works as an emotional framework for everyday life, not a container for services.

Its broader lesson is that regional building traditions can carry answers to contemporary social problems. The Moroccan riad was never designed for elderly care, yet its graded relationship between room, garden and street maps neatly onto the needs of residents who want both privacy and company. For a competition centred on shared living, Riad's offers a convincing proposition: the best model for senior housing may be a well-made town.

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Project credits: Riad's Co-Life (uni.xyz).