Who Built Casablanca?
When author Tahir Shah joined us on the podcast, he invited us into the Morocco he sought to recreate in his books. Sharing memories and anecdotes to illustrate the vibrancy and intensity of its cities, cultures and peoples, he gave us an insight into the experiences that culminated in his book The Caliph’s House. The conversation delves into the history of Casablanca in particular – including how it got its Spanish name. Inspired by this conversation, we looked further at the city’s story and architecture.
History of Casablanca
View of Casablanca © hnoversa/Fotolia via Britannica
Casablanca’s name
The origin of the city’s name is uncertain. It actually goes by many names – all meaning “the white house” in English — Casablanca, a-Dar el-Beida (الدار البيضاء) in Arabic, and Taddar Tumlilt in Tamazight. Before the 15th century, an Amazigh village called Anfa stood on the site of the present-day city. The Portuguese destroyed Anfa and rebuilt it as “Casa Branca” in the late 15th century. Others ascribe the name a-Dar el-Beida to Sultan Mohammed Ben Abdallah who rebuilt the city after it was destroyed in 1755 by an earthquake. Another theory credits Spanish merchants who settled there with the city’s renaming.
Casablanca From the 20th Century to Today
Morocco’s largest city, a major economic center, and a principal national and continental port, Casablanca is a city of great importance.
French colonial occupation of Morocco
Morocco was occupied by the French in 1907. Leveraging the assassination of Émile Mauchamp – a French doctor in Marrakesh – as a pretext to invade, the French colonial occupation began in March in Oujda. The tribes of Chaouia revolted against the French Treaty of Algeciras, so the French responded with heavy bombardment of Casablanca between the 5th and 7th of August. The city was completely destroyed by naval artillery fire and it’s estimated that up to 7000 Moroccans were killed.
The bloody expansion campaign continued until 1912 when the Treaty of Fez was signed, officially establishing the French Protectorate which would last until 1956. Casablanca was Morocco's main port during this time.
Casablanca during WWII
During the Second World War, Casablanca held substantial strategic importance. The 1942 Anglo-American “Operation Torch” targeted three locations in North Africa, one of which was Casablanca. The Americans occupied Casablanca on November 10, 1942. Subsequently, the city became the site of a major US air base and later hosted the Casablanca Conference (a British-US summit) in 1943.
Moroccan independence
Casablanca became a hotbed for anti-colonial sentiment in Morocco, with successive riots and violence against French rule defining the 50s. In 1947, the Sultan traveled to the Tangier International Zone to give a speech calling for independence from the French. The colonial forces attempted to sabotage and obstruct this speech, inciting conflict between the Senegalese Tirailleurs and Moroccan locals in what became known as the Darbat Salighan massacre. Later, the 1952 assassination of Farhat Hached – a Tunisian labor unionist – by the French intelligence service, provoked riots in Casablanca. Morocco finally gained independence in March 1956.
Casablanca’s French Colonial Architecture
Henri Prost
In 1913, the French resident general Hubert Lyautey appointed Henri Prost to spearhead the urban planning and development of Morocco’s cities. Morocco became an arena for French colonial architectural and urban planning experimentation. Prost produced city plans for Casablanca, Fes, Marrakesh, Meknes and Rabat. His work in Morocco would become a blueprint for the planning and development in post-war France.
Prost proposed a “radiocentric” plan that divided Casablanca into the “ville indigène” and the “ville nouvelle”. Initially, the focus was on separating the new part of Casablanca – where the Europeans would reside – from the Medina, home to the Moroccans. Prost quickly realized, however, that the city would need to expand to accommodate growing populations, resulting in the proposal of a new medina altogether – now called “Habbous”. The resulting cityscape is a kaleidoscope of different architectural styles: Art Deco, Neo-Mauresque, Paquebot, Streamline Moderne and Brutalist.
Michel Écochard
Michel Écochard succeeded Prost from 1946 to 1953. A major focus of his tenure was accommodating the rapidly growing population and urbanization caused by a rising rural exodus. He moved away from Prost’s radiocentric concept to a linear system structured around a repeatable grid, focussing on developing an architecture suitable for collective housing. This grid system took cues from and made space for “patio style living” – which was in turn inspired by the Arabic patio style. Though Échochard rejected Prost’s racial segregation of the city, in his own plans the Moroccan quarters still had twice the population density of the villes nouvelles.
GAMMA
Écochard also founded the Groupes de Architectes Modernes Marocains (GAMMA). The group’s original members included George Candillis, Alex Josic and Shadrach Woods. Écochard then commissioned the group to help design urban housing that “provided culturally specific living tissue” for laborers and migrants from the countryside.
Out of this commission came projects such as Sémiramis, Nid d’Abeille and Carrierres Centrales. The GAMMA movement thus began to center the local culture and climate – as well as modernist architectural principles – in their work, thus creating what they called a style called “vernacular modernism”.
Elie Azagury
Via MAMMA
After Morocco gained independence from France, Elie Azagury became the head of GAMMA and was considered to be the first Moroccan modernist architect. He was an outspoken communist and these principles filtered into his beliefs and visions for urban planning – particularly manifesting in modular social housing projects or cités, such as that in Hay Hassani. There was considerable tension between Écochard and Azagury, especially around the question of whether Moroccans could live in high-rises or not. Azagury believed that verticalization was an economic and social necessity and, as such, built his Derb Jdid project in direct response to Écochard.
Jean-Francois Zevaco
Jean-Francois Zevaco was a French-Moroccan architect born in Casablanca. He has come to symbolize the modernist architectural movement in Morocco. He joined GAMMA in the early 1950s and is often credited with changing Casablanca’s landscape with his brutalist schools such as the Theophile Guatier School.