CONTEMPORARY COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE

The principal objective of this abstract is to illustrate the transformation of towns which have been colonised, and still are, during the last centuries. The influence of colonial architecture reaches its apotheosis in Muslim countries where Islamic vernacular architecture stands close to colonial and modern architecture. Most of the times this produces the disintegration of traditional building forms with consequent loss of cultural identity. This happens at two levels: - architectural firms from western countries are culturally colonizing the developing countries by imposing standardised western architecture in unsuitable climates. - local architects are more and more impressed by the work of western architectural firms and tend to copy their work, with consequent deleterious results. This is the most damaging part of the chain, because, for instance, the urban periphery of Third World towns has now become a conglomeration of concrete boxes.
In the Draa Valley (South of Marocco), the outskirts of the ksars are colonised by a series of new buildings, literally a concrete version of the traditional rammed earth structures. These new buildings comprise a reinforced concrete skeleton and load-bearing concrete in-fill; in my opinion these new structures are wrong because they are structurally oversized and because they don't show any regard for the local climate. They also express the desire of abandoning the need for privacy which was typical of traditional introverted buildings and this is the result of the change of attitude towards lifestyle and the need to emulate the heroes imposed by media and satellite dishes. Gnerally speaking,t he architectural quality of these "Modernist" buildings is deficient from a formal point of view too; the International Style is practice in a way that makes it a poorer version of the original one. Casablanca is considered to be "the" Modernist town of Africa but, when analysed at the urban scale, one can see how the width of roads is not appropriate at all to the warm climate of that part of the African coast and it is no wonder if its inhabitants prefer to take their walks within the walls of the Medieval Medina. I like to think of this walk in the Medina as a search for identity in an environment which is constantly spoilt and contaminated.