Casablanca, Morocco. At the end of my high school years I got a book on modern architecture. The cover showed a building that looked different to anything I had seen before: an abstract composition of cubes, no windows visible from street level, all life hidden behind walls. It had absolutely nothing of a house, I thought. But it turned out to be a housing estate.
The image showed one of the modern housing blocks built by Swiss and French architects in Morocco in the 1950s. The housing programmes set up under colonial rule in North Africa were meant to “civilize” the bidonvilles, and “do good” for the inhabitants of the slums of the large cities. In effect, they rather created riots against than loyalty for the colonial rule. However, these housing programmes were also a welcome testing field for architectural and urbanistic experiments by the young generation of post war architects from Western Europe. When tracing the inspirations and consequences of these projects of the 1950s backwards by half a century and forwards by half a century, a remarkable back-and-forth of inspiration and adaption between the building cultures of Western Europe and North Africa becomes apparent.
In the early 20th century the first generation of modern artists and architects sought for inspiration beyond the bourgeois culture of the fin-de-siècle and travelled to the nearest “exotic” places they could reach: North Africa. For the creative class of that time the “travel to the Orient” became what the “travel to Italy” was a century earlier: a lifetime source of inspiration collected during the formative years of a creative career. Thus it is no surprise that white undecorated cubic forms and low-rise high-density housing clusters became part of the modernist canon. But, there was significant resistance against this formal language in Europe, and thus the colonial housing programmes in North Africa were a chance for architects to roll out modernist ideas in an environment that could not resist. In mid-20th century, the second generation of modernists in some ways exported back what the first generation of modernists had imported.
Once the new housing estates were built, for example, the “Habitat Marocain” in Casablanca, it turned out that the formal references to the images of the built heritage did not meet with the dynamics of the social life of the place, and thus, the buildings were adapted from on day one. Over the years these buildings were changed so much, that when I visited the housing projects I had seen on the cover of my book award it was almost impossible to recognise the original version. But still the images of the original buildings are icons of modernism, and the place is frequently visited by architecture tours. On site, I met Dutch architecture students. To my surprise they came to study the adaption process of modernist housing estates by the Moroccans in order to develop concepts for how to transform the large housing estates from the 1960s, which today accommodate a large part of the Moroccan population in the Netherlands. This would then be the export of the import of the export of the import.Casablanca, Morocco. At the end of my high school years I got a book on modern architecture. The cover showed a building that looked different to anything I had seen before: an abstract composition of cubes, no windows visible from street level, all life hidden behind walls. It had absolutely nothing of a house, I thought. But it turned out to be a housing estate.
The image showed one of the modern housing blocks built by Swiss and French architects in Morocco in the 1950s. The housing programmes set up under colonial rule in North Africa were meant to “civilize” the bidonvilles, and “do good” for the inhabitants of the slums of the large cities. In effect, they rather created riots against than loyalty for the colonial rule. However, these housing programmes were also a welcome testing field for architectural and urbanistic experiments by the young generation of post war architects from Western Europe. When tracing the inspirations and consequences of these projects of the 1950s backwards by half a century and forwards by half a century, a remarkable back-and-forth of inspiration and adaption between the building cultures of Western Europe and North Africa becomes apparent.
In the early 20th century the first generation of modern artists and architects sought for inspiration beyond the bourgeois culture of the fin-de-siècle and travelled to the nearest “exotic” places they could reach: North Africa. For the creative class of that time the “travel to the Orient” became what the “travel to Italy” was a century earlier: a lifetime source of inspiration collected during the formative years of a creative career. Thus it is no surprise that white undecorated cubic forms and low-rise high-density housing clusters became part of the modernist canon. But, there was significant resistance against this formal language in Europe, and thus the colonial housing programmes in North Africa were a chance for architects to roll out modernist ideas in an environment that could not resist. In mid-20th century, the second generation of modernists in some ways exported back what the first generation of modernists had imported.
Once the new housing estates were built, for example, the “Habitat Marocain” in Casablanca, it turned out that the formal references to the images of the built heritage did not meet with the dynamics of the social life of the place, and thus, the buildings were adapted from on day one. Over the years these buildings were changed so much, that when I visited the housing projects I had seen on the cover of my book award it was almost impossible to recognise the original version. But still the images of the original buildings are icons of modernism, and the place is frequently visited by architecture tours. On site, I met Dutch architecture students. To my surprise they came to study the adaption process of modernist housing estates by the Moroccans in order to develop concepts for how to transform the large housing estates from the 1960s, which today accommodate a large part of the Moroccan population in the Netherlands. This would then be the export of the import of the export of the import.