Casablanca — Art Déco and the Mauresque City
Built almost from scratch under the French Protectorate, Casablanca carries one of the world’s densest collections of interwar Art Déco. Its boulevards fuse European modernism with Moorish ornament.
At a glance
Casablanca grew from a modest port into Morocco’s largest city during the French Protectorate, when planner Henri Prost was invited in 1913 to lay out a European ville nouvelle beyond the old medina. Over the following two decades, architects filled his boulevards with cinemas, apartment blocks, banks and administrative palaces, working in an Art Déco idiom that borrowed freely from Moroccan craft traditions. The result is a working downtown where stepped concrete facades carry zellige tilework, carved plaster and horseshoe arches. Today the city holds a concentration of interwar architecture rivalled by few places, much of it still in daily use along the avenues that radiate from the central squares.
Key facts
- Country: Morocco
- Key period: 1920s–1930s (French Protectorate)
- Architects/planners: Henri Prost (1874–1959), urban plan from 1917; Marius Boyer (1885–1947), architect of many landmark buildings
- Essential sites: the administrative square (United Nations Square / former Place de France) with its Clock Tower, the Wilaya Building, Boulevard Mohammed V, the Sacré-Cœur church
- Population: roughly 3.2 million (urban, 2024)
History
When General Hubert Lyautey became the first French Resident-General of Morocco in 1912, Casablanca was a small walled town facing the Atlantic. Seeing its harbour potential, Lyautey assigned the planning of the new colonial port city to Henri Prost, who had already begun work in Morocco in 1913 at Lyautey’s invitation. Prost’s development and extension plan, dated to 1917, set out a European ville nouvelle outside the walls of the medina, together with a separate ville indigène intended to house Moroccans arriving from other cities. His scheme of radiating avenues and formal squares gave the modern city its shape.
Through the 1920s and 1930s the new boulevards filled rapidly with private and public building. Marius Boyer, who had trained at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and settled in Casablanca, became one of the most prolific designers of the era. His commissions ranged from the Glawi Building (1922) and the Lévy-Bendayan Building (1928) to the Wilaya Building (1928–1936), the administrative seat that still anchors the central square. Many of these projects were financed by the city’s merchant and Jewish patron families, whose names survive on the facades.
The city’s interwar momentum did not stop with architecture: Casablanca became internationally known when the Anfa Hotel, also designed by Boyer and completed in 1938, hosted the Casablanca Conference of 1943. By then Prost’s plan had been praised as a model for the application of modern urbanism, and the downtown had acquired the dense, layered character that visitors still encounter.
What you see
Casablanca’s signature is the fusion the French called style mauresque — Art Déco massing crossed with Moroccan ornament. Walk the boulevards radiating from the central squares and you see reinforced-concrete blocks with the period’s stepped silhouettes, rounded corners and vertical fluting, then closer up the borrowed Moroccan vocabulary: glazed zellige tile, carved stucco panels, wrought-iron balconies and the occasional horseshoe arch framing a doorway. The Clock Tower on the administrative square and the Wilaya Building set the civic tone, while cinemas and apartment houses along the avenues carry the more exuberant commercial Déco.
The best way to read the city is on foot, slowly, looking up. Many facades are weathered and some are at risk, which gives the centre an atmosphere of faded grandeur rather than museum polish. Ground-floor cafés and shops keep the streets active, so the architecture is experienced as a living downtown rather than a preserved quarter — bring a guidebook or join a heritage walk to pick out the named buildings among the everyday blocks.
Practical information
- Casamémoire, a local heritage association, runs guided architectural walks of the 20th-century city; check their schedule before visiting.
- Allow at least half a day on foot to cover the central boulevards and squares; a full day if you add the medina and the Hassan II Mosque on the coast.
- The downtown is walkable but busy; comfortable shoes and daylight hours are advisable for photographing facades.
- Many landmark buildings are offices or private residences — admire them from the street and respect that they are in use.
- French and Arabic are the working languages; a little of either helps with directions.
Getting there
Casablanca is served by Mohammed V International Airport (code CMN), about 30 km southeast of the centre, with a direct train link to the city’s main stations. Within the centre, a modern tramway and a dense bus network connect the squares, the medina and the coast, and the Art Déco district itself is compact enough to explore on foot once you arrive downtown.
Related in CHO
- Miami — South Beach and Tropical Art Déco
- Tunis — the Ville Nouvelle
- Mexico City — Bellas Artes and the Déco of La Condesa
Sources
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