NowCasablanca

Architecture

Architecture in Casablanca

Casablanca was largely built in thirty years of French protectorate, when planners tried out a Moorish-inflected Art Deco they called Mauresque across a whole new city. Independence and oil wealth later added a mosque on the shore built at a scale the colonial centre never reached.

• Hassan II Mosque

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  Completed 1993

  Michel Pinseau

  A mosque built out over the Atlantic on the city's shoreline, among the largest in the world. Michel Pinseau raised its minaret to 210 metres and roofed the prayer hall with a retractable timber and titanium cover, its floor partly of glass above the sea. Moroccan artisans worked the marble, cedar and tile across a decade of construction. It was built to give the modern city a monument on the scale of its ambitions.

• Cathédrale Sacré-Cœur

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  Completed 1952

  Paul Tournon

  A former Catholic cathedral at the edge of the Arab League Park, now empty and open to visitors. Paul Tournon cast it entirely in white concrete, drawing Gothic verticality without stone, its towers stepped like stacked crystals. The frame carries tall panels of coloured glass that light the bare interior. It reads as a Gothic church rethought in a material that had no medieval past.

• Mahkama du Pacha

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  Completed 1952

  Auguste Cadet

  A courthouse and reception hall in the Habous quarter, the planned new medina. Auguste Cadet built it in a full Hispano-Moorish idiom, its sixty-odd rooms finished with carved cedar ceilings, stucco and zellij by Moroccan craftsmen. The building is a colonial exercise in a traditional language rather than an old one. It is where the protectorate showed it could out-build the medina it was imitating.

• Immeuble Liberté

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  Completed 1950

  Léonard Morandi

  A residential tower near the old medina, seventeen storeys tall and long the highest in Africa. Léonard Morandi drew it in the streamlined paquebot manner, its curved balconies and railings borrowed from the ocean liners of the day. It rose far above the low colonial blocks around it as a deliberate demonstration of height. It marked the moment Casablanca started to build vertically.

• Wilaya of Casablanca

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  Completed 1937

  Marius Boyer

  The prefecture on Mohammed V Square, the civic centre laid out under the protectorate. Marius Boyer fronted the offices with a tall campanile clock tower and cut the Art Deco stonework with Moroccan arches and zellij tile. The tower anchors the square the colonial administration built as its stage. It is the set piece of the Mauresque style the new city was designed in.