The Architecture of the Enclave

The Architecture of the Enclave: Three instances of ‘Good Life’ for Casablanca

As a reflection of the human condition, architecture has always been struggling between openness and enclosure, the individual and the collective. The enclave is a physical testimony of these perpetual conflicts. Particularly in post-colonial cities such as Casablanca, it is a reoccurring figure. This thesis acknowledges conflict as a necessary means of evolution and tries to use the enclave as a projective tool to contrast and reanimate Casablanca’s city fabric.

The design is grounded in three distinct configurations of a minimum enclave, each based on the exageration of its three elements: the shell, the core, the space in-between. The result can be read as an architectural history: a pre-modern architecture of the mass (‘tomb‘), a classical architecture (‘temple‘)  and a modern architecture of space (‘basilica‘). Finding this formal configuration valid throughout scales, three formal models were loaded with a program and inserted in contrasting city morphologies: the Hotel in the Ville Europeanne, the  Garden in the bidonville (slum) and the Club in the Modernist housing quarter El Hank.