Until then, the architects of Casablanca had come from elsewhere: from Marseille like Marius Boyer, from Paris, from Gibraltar or from Algeria. Then came a generation that had not had to make the journey — it had been born on the spot.
Two children of the city
Jean-François Zevaco was born in Casablanca in 1916, Élie Azagury two years later, in 1918. The second, a Moroccan Jewish architect, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts before coming back to work in his native city.
Their arrival coincided with a change of language. The Art Deco of the 1930s gave way to a barer modernity, in which what counted was structure, shade and the relation to climate.
The post-war villas
In 1947, Zevaco signed a villa for Sami Suissa. Five years later, Azagury built that of the Schulmann family. These commissions belong to the same continuity as those of the pre-war clients — but the architectural answer, for its part, had changed era.
Azagury: from low-cost housing to the national Order
The career of Élie Azagury quickly went beyond the private commission. Between 1956 and 1960 he worked on low-cost housing in the Derb Jdid and Hay Hassani districts; in 1958 he built a tea-packing factory; in 1962, his own house; in 1963, schools for the French missions.
Above all, after the independence of Morocco, he became the first president of the Order of Moroccan Architects. A child of Casablanca, trained in France, took charge of the profession in a country that had just taken its destiny back into its own hands.
The thread that connects
Between the towers of the Assayag, raised in 1930, and the estates of Hay Hassani, there are fewer than thirty years. One and the same city, two generations of architects, and a question that remains the same: how do you house, with dignity, a population that never stops arriving?
Source: Jean-Louis Cohen, “Casablanca la juive: Public and Private Architecture 1912-1960”, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History (Fondazione CDEC).
💬 Commentaires
No comments yet. Be the first!