''Carrières Centrales'' () is a series of

modernist Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

housing developments in

Casablanca Casablanca (, ) is the largest city in Morocco and the country's economic and business centre. Located on the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic coast of the Chaouia (Morocco), Chaouia plain in the central-western part of Morocco, the city has a populatio ...

, Morocco designed in the 1950s by architects Georges Candillis, Shadrach Woods, Alexis Josic. The development aimed to create utopian "habitats" that would provide alternatives to slum life for working class residents of the city. Carrières Centrales has been noted as a prominent example of modernism within the

Maghreb The Maghreb (; ), also known as the Arab Maghreb () and Northwest Africa, is the western part of the Arab world. The region comprises western and central North Africa, including Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia. The Maghreb al ...

History

Michel Écochard was appointed Director of the of

French Morocco The French protectorate in Morocco, also known as French Morocco, was the period of French colonial rule in Morocco that lasted from 1912 to 1956. The protectorate was officially established 30 March 1912, when Sultan Abd al-Hafid signed the ...

in 1946. Following a multidisciplinary study of the nation's housing needs, Écochard established a plan to develop a number of housing projects for the

working poor The working poor are working people whose incomes fall below a given poverty line due to low-income jobs and low familial household income. These are people who spend at least 27 weeks in a year working or looking for employment, but remain und ...

at the outskirts of Morocco's major cities. Écochard conceived of a substantial program that included a specially designed 8 x 8 meter

grid plan In urban planning, the grid plan, grid street plan, or gridiron plan is a type of city plan in which streets run at right angles to each other, forming a grid. Two inherent characteristics of the grid plan, frequent intersections and orthogon ...

. Carrières Centrales, a site in the Hay Mohammadi district of

, was the first project to test Écochard's design. The development aimed to provide affordable housing for individuals working in a nearby factory and French homes. In 1952, Georges Candilis, Shadrach Woods, and Alexis Josic—the architects Écochard assigned to the project—designed a series of utopian modernist modular complexes for the site that additional educational, administrative, and religious facilities. Influenced by Le Corbusier's

Unité d'habitation The ''Unité d'habitation'' (, ''Housing Unit'') is a Modern architecture, modernist residential housing Typology (urban planning and architecture), typology developed by Le Corbusier, with the collaboration of painter-architect Nadir Afons ...

and the communal nature of slum life, the resulting mid-rise complexes featured highly collective multilevel living exemplified by myriad balconies. The site's buildings became known by the residents as ''Semiramis'' and ''Nid D'Abeille'' as references to their visual similarities to honeycombs and the

Hanging Gardens of Babylon The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World listed by Hellenic culture. They were described as a remarkable feat of engineering with an ascending series of tiered gardens containing a wide variety of tree ...

respectively. Since their construction, many of the complex's residents have modified the buildings significantly, most frequently by walling off the original balconies.

References

Buildings and structures in Casablanca Residential buildings completed in 1952 20th century in Casablanca 20th-century architecture in Morocco {{DEFAULTSORT:Carrières Centrales