The Patio House Typology and the Modern Architecture: Two practical and theoretical lessons from the Moroccan colonial context

Abstract

Architectural practices of mass housing in the French protectorate context of Morocco was a fertile breeding ground for responses to address the urgent needs of housing. While the Modern Movement provides universal solutions to answer housing demand through universal concepts, disregarding the specific questions of context, a shift occurred in the city of Casablanca from 1917 with foreign architects. Their work not only aims to address the housing needs but fundamentally to set up an "adapted habitat". Under the concern of local culture and the everyday life of the rural inhabitants, their practices inaugurate relevant solutions for a large-scale patio house urban scheme. This contextual interpretation reading culminates into two great proposals: the neo-medina “Habous neighborhood” and the grid 8x8 of Ecochard in “Carrières Centrales”. Through architectural and historical analysis, this paper is concerned with how in the Moroccan colonial context the proposals of mass housing programs associated to the patio house typology contributed to erect new practices and theories that goes beyond its own context. This makes manifest the fact that the Moroccan colonial context was never 'a laboratory', but rather a fertile territory of innovative leading principles for the modern architecture.

Keywords

• patio house
• adapted-habitat
• habous neighborhood
• the 8x8 grid
• casablanca