At the dawn of the sustainable Moroccan modernism: Bioclimatic approach in early GAMMA group’s architecture

Abstract

During the first half of the twentieth century, the specific context of Morocco served as a breeding ground for developing new approaches for modern urbanism and architecture. While colonial modern architectures attempted to reflect the local culture and local architectural language by reinterpreting vernacular architecture at the level of typological elements and artisanship, another approach culminated around the independence in the architectural reflections initiated by the Group of Moroccan Modern Architects, stressing new concerns for adapting modern architecture to its context, climate, place and practices. Their approach, by detaching from both the colonial culturalist approach and the universalist solutions of the modern doctrine, inaugurated a new turning point in the history of modern architecture in Morocco, that constitutes the manifestation of early bioclimatic concerns in modern architecture in the Moroccan context, which translated on both the urban and the architectural scale. The Group of Modern Moroccan Architects, GAMMA Group's interest in vernacular architecture and its reinterpretation crystallized in their early productions by paying particular attention to the control of environmental parameters such as sunlight and ventilation, while exploring local architectural languages as well as modern ones, as their respective construction methods and materials. Examples of this approach includes the use of the patio and its reinterpretation from the level of the urban block to public facilities to the level of the housing cell by architects Michel Ecochard and Jean Francois Zevaco. At the urban scale, the specific architectural language developed by the GAMMA Group and landscape approach in large touristic facilities as the Dades hotel designed by architects Patrice Demazieres and Abdeslam Faraoui, as well as in the reconstructed city of Agadir, payed attention to the realities of local climate, topography and practices as early attempts towards a contextualized sustainable modern urbanism in Morocco. This article aims through representative examples, to bring an insight to what could be considered as the premises of bioclimatism in the history of modern Morocco as developed by the GAMMA group, in order to highlights how their contribution to the first reflections about a bioclimatic architecture paved the way towards a sustainable Moroccan modern language embedded in its context.