Habitat Marocain Documents: Dynamics Between Formal and Informal Housing

Casablanca’s Habitat Marocain housing project was built between 1954 and 1956 by Swiss architects Jean Hentsch and André Studer, part of the major postwar reconstruction and expansion undertaken by the French colonial administration after World War II. The building was intended to house local inhabitants rather than European expats, and that intention guided the architects in their design, which reflected a number of ethnographic assumptions about the Moroccan populace.
            This richly illustrated book explores the process of designing and building Habitat Marocain, illustrating the complicated interplay of ethnographic imagination and design synthesis, as well as the increasingly informal further development of the project after it was officially completed.