An Art Deco manifesto
Built between 1930 and 1932 on boulevard Hassan Seghir, the Immeuble Assayag raises its three towers above Casablanca. This vertical composition, which has become one of the city's recognisable silhouettes, bears the signature of Marius Boyer. Here Art Deco is not a decorative skin applied to a façade: it structures the whole building, from the drawing of the volumes to the way light and air move through it.
Why three towers?
The project answered an urban ambition of its time. By the late 1920s the authorities were seeking to weld the port district and the business district into one continuous whole; in the spring of 1930 the secretary-general of the Protectorate, Eirik Labonne, put before the municipal commission a plan to recast the city centre with very tall buildings. Fiercely contested, the plan came to nothing; but Boyer, who drew his own proposals for the port districts that same year, gave a clear answer: arcaded towers, brought together into a single ensemble.
The building has ten levels above the ground-floor shops: six floors of three- and four-room flats, a seventh floor of studios at the first setback, an eighth floor of garçonnières, laundries and maids’ rooms, then two levels of terraced duplexes. Three blocks, separated by narrow gaps, thus rise side by side. They remain distinct up to the seventh floor, where they finally come together to form a single volume. Each block has its own stairwell, which gives the flats genuine independence on three sides: a design at once monumental from a distance and intimate in daily use.
Towers in flower
In plan, each tower is as much “floriform” as cruciform, Jean-Louis Cohen and Monique Eleb observe. At the centre an octagonal core houses the lift and leads to flats of three or four rooms; set around it, the main rooms are all well lit. A cross-shaped void, capped by a glazed roof, carries borrowed daylight down to the service rooms.
Comfort also meant quiet: two flats are always separated by a service stair, the lift or storerooms. A secondary building of four storeys follows the same principle, this time made up of three “half-flowers”. Between the two buildings the inner street covers the underground garage; at street level, shops served a district then booming.
Light as a material
Among the building's signature features, the great verrières — the tall glazed screens that light and ventilate the stairwells — hold a place apart. They are not ornament: it is they that give the common parts direct daylight and natural ventilation. Daylight reaches down into the heart of the building and accompanies residents and visitors alike in their comings and goings, while air moves freely through the vertical circulation spaces.
This attention to everyday comfort extends even to the details of the fittings, such as the refuse chute — an avant-garde refinement in a block of flats of the early 1930s.
Living at height
On the boulevard Hassan Seghir side, generous terraces were laid out in front of the flats. As the building rises they change character: at the seventh floor they open out in three successive tiers, each crowned by a self-contained flat of about ninety square metres. At the eighth floor the window bands widen onto buanderies — communal rooftop laundry rooms —, recessed between the towers.
The eighth floor, the one that ties everything else together
This level is like no other. There are no standard flats here, but the laundries, the maids’ rooms and two garçonnières. The word denotes a small self-contained dwelling occupied by a bachelor; it also denoted, more discreetly, the pied-à-terre that a married man might keep in order to entertain there without his wife's knowledge. The arrangement belonged as much to the urban manners of the 1930s as to the vocabulary of the property trade.
It is on this floor, too, that the access to the penthouses of the top two levels is to be found, and where the connecting doors from one tower to the next open. The eighth is therefore not an ordinary residential floor: it is the one that ties everything else together.
According to Cohen and Eleb, this level also held maids’ rooms, complete with balconies: with the broad terraces of its garçonnières and duplexes, the Assayag remains in their eyes the most spectacular of Casablanca’s terraced buildings. The three duplexes at the top, which the Gazette de l’Électricité called “little villas” in 1935, are still “the villas” in the caption of a 1993 photograph published by the two historians.
This arrangement places the Assayag in an openly European line of descent: that of the Parisian architect Henri Sauvage, who devised the stepped, terraced block and was already putting the communal laundries on the roof. Boyer took up the type in conditions more favourable than in Paris: strong demand for flats with terraces, more generous regulations, larger plots. In Casablanca the idea takes on a particular resonance — the washing, the sky and the city share the same top floor. This life of the heights continues on the Spaces & Air page.
The skyscraper Boyer dreamed of
With its ten storeys, the Assayag was then among the tallest buildings in Casablanca. Boyer gathered his most cherished references here, on a scale new to the city: the building derives both from his 1930 project for the port districts and from a 1929 lecture in which he described the ideal skyscraper — cross-shaped, with no inner courtyards, warehouses and garages in the basements, shops at street level, offices and homes on the floors above.
He looked higher still: a skyscraper twice the height of the Assayag, should he find a bold enough client, with banks of lifts, letter lifts, refuse chutes and cooled rooms, laundries and drying rooms in its upper parts, restaurants and children’s nurseries. That skyscraper was never built. The perspective of the Assayag, for its part, appears in the album Boyer published in 1933, Casablanca, travaux d’architecture.
The dialogue of lines and curves
The language of the building lies in a controlled tension between the rigour of its lines and the softness of its curves. This manner of writing is no mere exercise in style: for Boyer it expressed the meeting of Moroccan tradition and Western modernity, in the image of Casablanca itself.
“Between the lines of my plans and the curves of my buildings, I have sought to weave a harmonious dialogue between Moroccan tradition and Western modernity, embodying thereby the cultural bridge that Casablanca represents, a city of history and of the future.”
— Marius Boyer
The Art Deco detail
Pierre Pilven, the building’s managing agent (syndic), sums the Assayag up in a phrase our technical dossier repeats: the building is said to be set apart by “the absence of decoration in its smallest details, because it is, in itself, a complete work of art”. Jean-Louis Cohen and Monique Eleb describe the same decade differently: in 1930s Casablanca, work on volume takes precedence over decoration. The photographs call for some qualification. Decoration has not disappeared from the Assayag: it has moved indoors. It stands in the street door, in the floors, in the railings, in the glass. This section gathers what we are able to show, family by family. It is deliberately incomplete: we write here only what a photograph or a publication confirms, the date of several of these pieces is not established, and the list will grow as the survey goes on.
The doors first. One enters through a double-leaf door whose frame and rails are of black-painted metal: offset flat bars make up an asymmetrical geometry that the field of the transom repeats. Some of the panels are filled with ribbed patterned glass; others were given clear glass. The door opens between two pilasters faced with ochre tiles, under a canopy slab.
The joinery, inside, is harder to read. On the landings our images show, the doors to the flats are of dark wood with vertical panels; the gallery of the halls shows them in place. Elsewhere a door opens in a surround of speckled grey stone — our 2025 Heritage Days album sees in it “a granite-framed doorway” — onto a leaf of grooved varnished wood. Where that door leads, and exactly what stone this is, we do not know.
Of locks and hardware we can say almost nothing. Only two pieces are legible, and both are on the street door: each leaf carries a long tubular bar handle fixed on two brackets, and the centre stile of the right-hand leaf takes a cylinder under a small pale escutcheon of brass tone. Handles inside the flats, window espagnolette bolts (crémones), hinges, door numbers, letter boxes: none of this has yet been surveyed close up. We prefer to write that down rather than describe objects we have not seen.
The floors are by far the best documented family. On the fifth-floor landing, the pink-brown terrazzo (granito) is cut into trapezoids by broad bands of black terrazzo edged with a thin yellow line; the field is bounded by a wide dark band and a coved skirting. Seen close up, that line is not a metal joint: it is a row of small yellow ceramic tesserae; other rows, blue, ochre and garnet, separate the fields of colour elsewhere. This floor and its lines recur on the landings of every storey and around the circular staircase; the granito album shows them close up. The same material occurs elsewhere in the building, composed differently each time: in another rotunda, the terrazzo is made of pale segments separated by dark bands and fine yellow lines, with a wide dark ring around the stair core; at the foot of the circular staircase, the pale floor carries a similar ring and line. At the bottom of one stair core runs a frieze of small chequerboard tiles, above a grey skirting. Terrazzo is not reserved for the common parts: the photographs of the Poetic Labyrinth show flats whose floor has remained intact.
The rest of the floors belong to other materials. The vestibule keeps its large slabs of veined marble; the corridor leading to the staircase has a grey marble floor and a brown marble dado. The origin of these marbles is not established, and we shall not deduce it from the quarries cited in the article on the builders of Casablanca. The eighth-floor laundries are paved with square terracotta tiles laid diagonally. One room keeps a black-and-white chequerboard, also laid diagonally, with an oculus at the far end; we do not yet know on which floor it is. The drying terrace, for its part, is of bare concrete; on another terrace, the floor is made of square tiles covered with red paint. Elsewhere, the material of the red floor is not established.
The ironwork of the common parts is spare, with almost no ornament. The balustrade of the circular staircase: a tubular handrail backed by two flat rails on flat-iron standards, turning in a single unbroken line all the way up. In the service stairs, a plain flat-iron rail whose end curls into a volute at the start of the flight, visible in a photograph in the album of the staircases. Two pieces are exceptions: a wrought-iron door with scrollwork, over dark wood, against a granite frame, and a second scrollwork grille, whitened, on the landing of the circular staircase. Their plant motifs resemble nothing else in the building and their date is not established: they may be late additions. On the ground floor, at the corner, the shop windows are closed by folding metal chevron gates, under the concrete canopy.
The glass, finally, appears in three distinct forms. In the well of the circular staircase, a geometric stained-glass panel: rectangles of coloured glass and of textured white glass, caught in a black lattice, the large fields at the top, a tight composition of bars and small rectangles at the bottom; a second panel, orange and yellow, bordered by strips of white ribbed glass, answers it a little further on. Their date is not established: nothing in the images allows us to state that this is the glazing of 1932. The glass blocks, for their part, are attested in a single place, but it is the most spectacular one: the courtyard, which is the roof of the underground garage and lets the light through a hundred and ninety-two glass blocks, counted on the three groups shown in the aerial view. The service stairwells, lastly, carry steel frames filled with horizontal glass louvres, backed in their lower part by an added wire mesh, visible from the courtyard as from the landings.
There remains the crowning element, the only element of decoration one sees from a distance, high up: the parapets of the towers and of the upper setbacks are pierced with a regular row of square openings, right through, just below the cornice; on the terraces, the pierced parapets take up the motif in rectangular openings. It is not an applied ornament: the parapet is pierced through its own mass. What it is made of, we do not know: the 2026 works revealed hollow bricks under the render, at the top of the building’s blocks. The pattern itself is regular.
We do not know who cut these marbles, poured these terrazzo floors, forged these grilles and set this glass: no name is written on the walls, and no invoice or contractor’s plate has yet reached us. An old photograph, a family memory, a rediscovered estimate: that is what this section needs in order to go on being written.
The full inventory — families, route, glossary — is on the page The Art Deco detail; the albums open, family by family, in the gallery section of the same name.
Architecture that is lived in
The Immeuble Assayag is not a monument frozen in time. It is a lived-in private residence, where exhibitions, film shoots and cultural events continue to bring the place to life; visits are possible only on the occasion of these events, such as the Journées du Patrimoine, Casablanca’s annual heritage open days,. To discover the building in pictures — its towers, its arcades, its glazed screens and its terraces — turn to the gallery.
Source: Jean-Louis Cohen and Monique Eleb, “Casablanca. Mythes et figures d'une aventure urbaine”, Éditions Hazan, chapter “Des arts décoratifs à la modernité”; Marius Boyer, Casablanca, travaux d’architecture, 1933, cited from these authors.