It is light that awakens materials to life and gives form to space. A simple beam of light can make a surface speak.
في دائرة الضوء
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It is light that awakens materials to life and gives form to space. A simple beam of light can make a surface speak.
A1920 map of Casablanca’ s old medina offers a glimpse of a city oriented towards the sea, with its principal quarters identified, as the map’ s own legend notes, by the names they once bore. Spreading across gently sloping ground that descends towards the ocean, the city takes the form of an elongated quadrilateral, with its sides running parallel to the shoreline. A fortified rampart, built of stone and pierced by gateways, encircles it and remains remarkably intact to this day.
Unlike other Moroccan medinas, which retain more traces of the past, the historic character of the buildings in Casablanca’ s old quarter— known to ancient and medieval geographers as Anfa— is less immediately apparent. Rebuilt in the eighteenth century after the Portuguese completely destroyed it in 1465, it is a compact city of narrow, labyrinthine streets, where a handful of old residential doorways, carved and dressed in stone, offer glimpses of an earlier architectural world.
For the visitor exploring on foot, the journey leads primarily towards Bab el-Marsa, the former landing place, now cut off from the sea and absorbed into the mainland. Along the way stands an archaic semaphore, reached by a short flight of steps, still rising in rammed earth above a small square planted with ficus trees, alive with sparrows’ chirping at sunset.
From there, the route opens onto the fortified Sqala, the old artillery battery, where dark metal cannons still point towards a sea that was pushed farther out long ago by the construction of the great breakwater and the development of Casablanca’ s modern port. Nearby, a mausoleum dedicated to one of the city’ s revered patron saints introduces a quiet note of spirituality. Its dome rises towards the sky, crowned by a slender finial adorned with gilded spheres, recalling the minarets of mosques. Down one of the perpendicular lanes once stood an old caravanserai( Khan). Built near the landing place and the customs offices of its time, the long-neglected remnant of the past was chosen as the site for the Casablanca Museum of Photography and Visual Arts.
The guiding idea was to make the restored and transformed building an extension of the old medina: to allow the new art space to merge with its historic walls and, through the development of a broader cultural district, to preserve as much as possible the site’ s original architectural character. The project was entrusted to Japanese architect Tadao Ando, who set foot on African soil for the first time to create an architectural work.
Ando’ s relationship with light is well known. More than any other architect, he places the physical laws governing light at the heart of his conception of space:
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