Parametric
Design
Project Name
Ra'anana Elderly Home
Sector
Assisted Living
Location
Tel Aviv, Israel
Year
2024
Project Team
Abigail Benouaich
Auerbach Halevy Architects
The Ra’anana Elderly Home rethinks assisted living as an active, connected environment embedded within the city. Rather than a singular volume, the building steps and opens toward its surroundings, creating a porous relationship between residents, landscape, and street life.
The massing strategy balances density with openness, carving terraces and shared spaces into the form to bring light, air, and social interaction into every level. The project establishes a new typology for later-life living, one that prioritizes autonomy, wellbeing, and a strong connection to both community and nature.
Positioned adjacent to a significant green corridor, the project extends the landscape into the architecture. The building footprint is carefully shaped to preserve and enhance existing vegetation, allowing the surrounding park to flow through and around the site.
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This integration creates a layered public realm, where residents engage with shaded pathways, gardens, and communal terraces, while maintaining visual continuity with the wider urban landscape. The architecture acts as a mediator between built form and nature, reinforcing a sense of openness and accessibility.
The massing is conceived as a responsive system, where each floorplate adapts to orientation, light, and programmatic needs. The stepping geometry reduces perceived scale while enabling generous terraces that function as extensions of the living spaces.
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This approach allows the building to maintain a compact footprint while offering spatial richness typically associated with low-rise environments. The formal logic is both performative and legible, clearly expressing how environmental and social considerations shape the architecture.
The project is driven by a continuous vertical movement that links ground-level activity with elevated communal spaces. This upward progression is expressed through a series of stepped terraces, allowing the building to gradually transition from urban edge to elevated landscape.​​
The plan unfolds as a quiet continuum between private life and shared experience. Anchored by a central communal heart, the building extends outward in two gentle wings, where each dwelling is positioned along the perimeter to receive light, air, and views.
At ground level, the project engages directly with the public realm, activating the street through transparent edges and communal functions. Shared amenities are positioned to encourage interaction between residents and the wider neighborhood, supporting a sense of inclusion rather than isolation.
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Sustainability is embedded throughout the design: deep terraces provide passive shading, dual-aspect units enable natural cross-ventilation, and the material strategy supports thermal performance suited to the local climate. Together, these elements create a living environment that is both comfortable and resilient.
Project developed at Auerbach Halevy Architects. Selected drawings and diagrams by Abigail Benouaich.
Some renders and schematic elements are based on original project materials.