Architecture of Casablanca
[2] It was destroyed by the earthquake of 1755 and rebuilt by Sultan Muhammad III of Morocco, who employed European architects, and it was renamed Ad-dār al-Bayḍā (الدار البيضاء).
[4] The French bombardment of Casablanca the following year destroyed much of the city, which at the time consisted of the medina, the mellah (Jewish quarter), and an area known as Tnaker.
[3] Under the French Protectorate officially established in 1912, the resident general Hubert Lyautey employed Henri Prost in the urban planning of Casablanca.
[11] Casablanca was one of a number of cities—including Essaouira, Marrakesh, and Rabat—that were revitalized after the earthquake of 1755, by Sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah—who Abdallah Laroui called "the architect of modern Morocco.
The oldest European structure in Casablanca was an abandoned prison allegedly built by the Portuguese, arcades of which now decorate the Arab League Park.
[11] The original clock tower erected by Charles Martial Joseph Dessigny in 1910 was the first structure built by the French after the bombardment and invasion of Casablanca in 1907.
[10] In this context, "The iconographic power of emblematic images plays an underexplored role in the reproduction of foundational narratives about Casablanca's margins, shaping both popular and state discourses.
"[18] These actions highlight the inherent power dynamics and the colonial gaze that shaped the urban landscape of Casablanca, marking a deliberate effort to mold the city's spatial and social fabric Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier, landscape gardener and head of the Service des Promenades et des Plantations in Paris for 26 years, was summoned from France at the recommendation of Paul Tirard, general secretary of the colonial government in Morocco.
[19] Forestier and Prost, both active members in the Musée social's section of urban and rural hygiene, introduced the idea of a cité-jardin, inspired by garden city movement in England.
[19]Casablanca is boldly constructing new projects that Paris is too timid to try.Casablanca became a laboratory for the principles of urbanisme d’avant-garde, including a trenchant division and complete disassociation between the medina and the ville européenne.
[22] For the colonial administration, the Moroccan medina was at once a breeding ground of disease to be contained, an antiquity of the past with Oriental charm to be preserved, and a refuge for would-be insurgents to be squelched.
[23] The main streets radiated southeast from the port, the medina, and the Souq Kbir (السوق الكبير grand market) which became Place de France and is now United Nations Square.
[29]In 1916, four years after the official establishment of the French protectorate, Prost and Albert Laprade designed a nouvelle ville indigène—now known as the Hubous—a new medina near the sultan's palace to the east of the new center.
[31][19] On land given to the Ministry of Islamic Affairs [ar] by a Jewish businessman named Bendahan, the planners attempted to blend features of a traditional Moroccan city, as they saw it, with the principles of a cité-jardin and modern standards of sanitation and urban planning.
[24][19] The French writer Louis Thomas, in Le Maroc de 1917, saw the experiment of the cité-jardin of the nouvelle ville indigène as offering a potential model for visitors from the 'bled', for the qaids and pashas of other cities.
[33][34][35] Albert Laprade first set up a rectangular area with an orthogonal street layout, while Auguste Cadet [fr] and Edmond Brion manipulated traditional Moroccan forms employed in the Hubous.
[33] In addition to Henri Prost, Albert Laprade, Marius Boyer, Auguste Cadet [fr], and Edmond Brion were some of the early planners and architects of the city.
[36] The development of the ville nouvelle was fueled by investment by diverse patrons, including the Makhzani former minister of State Holdings Omar Tazi, the Jewish businessman Haim Bendahan, and the southern Amazigh pasha of Marrakesh Thami El Glaoui.
"[40] Morocco's permanent delegation to UNESCO submitted a nomination file to get Casablanca's 20th century architecture classified as a World Heritage Site.
[6] At the 1953 Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), ATBAT-Afrique—the Africa branch of Atelier des Bâtisseurs founded in 1947 by figures including Le Corbusier, Vladimir Bodiansky, and André Wogenscky—prepared a study of Casablanca's bidonvilles entitled "Habitat for the Greatest Number.
[7][53] In the early 1950s, Écochard commissioned GAMMA to design housing that provided a "culturally specific living tissue"[54] for laborers and migrants from the countryside.
[6] Ecochard's 8x8 meter model, designed to address Casablanca's issues with overpopulation and rural exodus, was pioneering in the architecture of collective housing.
[9][7] Azagury—young, controversial, and an outspoken Communist—was active in Hay Hassani designing cités, modular public housing units, that combined elements of modern and vernacular architecture taking local culture and lifestyles into account.
[57][58][59] He and colleagues such as Jean-François Zevaco were also involved in designing experimental private villas in neighborhoods in western Casablanca such as Anfa and Ain Diab with inspiration from Richard Neutra and Oscar Niemeyer.
[63] As the economy transformed, industrial buildings, such as the Postal Sorting Center at Mohamed Diouri Square and the Sidi Othmane Wholesale Market (1976–79) of Abdeslam Faraoui and Patrice de Mazières, were constructed according to new Brutalist principles of minimalism and efficiency.
