The hôtels particuliers of the rue d'Alger

We know the Marius Boyer of the great blocks and the taut façades. There is another, more ornamental, to be met with in a residential district close to the centre: the Boyer of the hôtels particuliers (private town mansions).

A district of grand houses

In the 1920s and 1930s a great many private houses went up in this then sought-after district. The most sumptuous are to be found in the rue d'Alger and in the street adjoining it. They embody a style peculiar to the Dar el-Beïda of those years, one that drew at the same moment on Moroccan art, Art Nouveau and Art Deco.

The hand of the craftsmen

What strikes one in the hôtels particuliers Boyer designed in 1930 is the place given to the craftsman's trade. There the architect put his trust in finely carved stone and in the mastery of traditional plasterwork carved with plant motifs — craft work that produces a refined style, denser than that of the great blocks.

The district is nonetheless anything but uniform: villas in a neo-Moorish spirit rub shoulders there with villas that are frankly functional. The neighbouring street, the rue Kori, thus received in 1931-1932 two hôtels particuliers by Emmanuel Chaine and Pierre Jabin — the latter would build, a few years later, the Moretti-Milone building and its eleven storeys.

Two registers, one and the same architect

Between these chiselled houses and the towers of the boulevard Hassan Seghir there is no contradiction but an evolution. Boyer will have shown that he knew how to make material speak when the brief allowed it, before stripping his language bare to answer the vertical city.

This double nature can still be read today in the Assayag: nothing ornamental, and yet the utmost care given to light, to air and to use. The architect's full career is traced on the Architect page.

Source: Jean-Louis Cohen and Monique Eleb, “Casablanca. Mythes et figures d'une aventure urbaine”, Éditions Hazan.