Art Deco Centre Ville

The man responsible for the shape of what you see around you was a French urbanist named Henri Prost. Appointed in nineteen fourteen, Prost designed an entire new French city alongside — and carefully separated from — the existing Arab medina. His plan was ambitious, almost ruthlessly geometric: wide boulevards, civic squares, a grid of blocks that would not have looked out of place in Haussman's Paris. But Prost was not simply building a little France in North Africa.

The architectural style that emerged here was something genuinely new, and it has a name: Mauresque, sometimes written as Moorish Revival or Neo-Moorish. It takes the geometric rigour of Art Deco — the clean horizontal lines, the streamlined facades, the decorative restraint — and layers on top of it the visual language of Islamic architecture. You will see this everywhere today: the honeycomb stucco called muqarnas carved into archways, the zellige tilework in geometric patterns, the horseshoe arches framing windows and doors, the minarets rising from civic buildings that are technically French in plan but Moroccan in ornament. It is a hybrid style born of colonialism, and it is spectacular.

Turn slowly. The post office building on your right was completed in nineteen eighteen. The courthouse behind you went up in nineteen twenty-two. The building to your left that looks like it could be a town hall in Lyon but topped with a minaret — that is the Wilaya, the regional government building. None of them are quite like anything you have ever seen anywhere else on Earth.

The fountain in the centre of the square runs with water that reflects the facades all around it. In the early morning, before the traffic builds on the surrounding boulevards, this square has a calm grandeur that feels genuinely European. Then a muezzin calls from a minaret somewhere nearby, the smell of cumin and harissa drifts over from a street stall on the far side, and you remember exactly where you are.

This is the starting point. We have four kilometres and nine more stops ahead of us. Let's walk.

The French were politically shrewd in their building programme. They needed to project power and modernity — this was colonial administration, after all — but they also needed not to appear as if they were erasing Moroccan culture. The Mauresque style gave them a way to do both simultaneously: build in the image of France's rational, organised civic tradition while wrapping it in the decorative vocabulary of the country being administered. Whether this was respect or appropriation is a question Moroccans still debate with energy.

What is beyond debate is the quality of the craftsmanship on display. The carved stucco panels in the entrance archways were executed by Moroccan artisans trained in the traditional maallim workshops of Fez and Marrakech. The geometric patterns are mathematically precise — the tilework especially, which uses the overlapping-star system of traditional Islamic geometric design that requires mastery of complex proportional relationships. These craftsmen were not decorating a French building. They were continuing a tradition that stretched back eight centuries.

Go closer and run your eyes along the base of the main entrance arch. The alternating colours of the voussoir stones — the wedge-shaped blocks that make up the arch — come from a Roman tradition, but the horseshoe profile of the arch itself is Islamic. Two civilisations, one archway, one building, one city. That is Casablanca.

As you walk, look up. The buildings range from pure International Style modernism — flat roofs, horizontal strip windows, stark white facades that owe nothing to Islamic tradition — to full Mauresque fantasy, their facades encrusted with carved plaster, their rooflines punctuated by mini-minarets. In between are dozens of buildings that blend both vocabularies in different proportions, each one making a slightly different bet on how to be simultaneously French and Moroccan.

Pay particular attention to the covered arcades at street level. This is one of Prost's most practical and successful ideas: requiring all ground-floor commercial buildings along major boulevards to include a covered colonnade, creating shelter from both sun and rain. On a hot afternoon in July, these arcades make the difference between a pleasant stroll and an ordeal. They also create a continuous rhythm at street level that unifies buildings of wildly different styles — you can walk the full length of the boulevard under cover, moving from one architectural fantasy to the next.

The boulevard today is a little worn. Some of the great buildings have faded, their ornate facades in need of restoration. The shops at street level have been updated without much concern for the architecture above. This is the reality of a working city, not a museum. But if you let your eyes drift above the street-level clutter to the upper floors and rooflines, the ambition of what was built here in those forty-odd years is unmistakable.

Stop for a moment at any cafe under the arcades. Order a mint tea or a cafe noir. Watch the city moving around you. The people you see are the heirs of a city that went from twenty thousand to four million in a single century — one of the fastest urban growths anywhere on Earth.

The original Banque d'Etat du Maroc was established under the Act of Algeciras in nineteen oh six — an international agreement signed by thirteen European powers and the United States that resolved a diplomatic crisis over Morocco and effectively opened the country to French economic penetration. The bank building that rose from that agreement was a physical expression of financial colonialism dressed in the most beautiful clothes anyone could imagine.

Morocco regained full sovereignty in nineteen fifty-six, and the Banque du Maroc — now the Bank Al-Maghrib — continued to occupy and maintain these buildings. There is something pleasing about this continuity: the architectural legacy of the Protectorate now administered entirely by Moroccans, the carved stucco panels dusted and maintained by craftsmen who trace their professional lineage directly to the same maallim masters who cut the originals.

If you have time, look into the entrance lobby. Even in working banks, the quality of the interior finishes in these Protectorate-era buildings is often remarkable: marble floors, carved wooden ceilings in the cassette pattern called alfarje, decorative ironwork in geometric patterns on the interior grilles. The French were building to impress, and they brought the full resources of both European modernism and Moroccan craft tradition to bear on the project.

Notice also the street life around this building. The financial district of any city reveals its economic metabolism, and Casablanca's is unmistakably African — faster, denser, more chaotic than a European equivalent, the pavements more crowded, the negotiation between pedestrian and vehicle more creative. This is a real city, not a heritage zone.

The vegetable and spice sections radiate out from the fish hall: enormous sacks of cumin, paprika, ras el hanout, dried rose petals, preserved lemons, argan oil in unlabelled bottles, baskets of olives in a dozen varieties and marinades. The smell is a full architectural experience in itself — turmeric and ocean, mint and machine oil, the sweetness of fresh-baked bread from the bakery stalls at the perimeter.

The market also serves as an informal social exchange. Housewives negotiate with the same fishmonger their mothers negotiated with. Restaurant buyers arrive early to get the best catch. Tourists wander in and are immediately surrounded by offers of assistance that are both genuine and commercially motivated.

Casablanca is a city of traders. The port behind us is still one of the busiest in Africa. The commercial DNA runs deep here, deeper than the Art Deco facades, deeper than the French plan — it is what drew the Europeans here in the first place, and what survived them when they left. The market is the city being itself.

The Old Medina of Casablanca is not one of Morocco's great medinas — that distinction belongs to Fez, to Marrakech, to Chefchaouen. This one is relatively modest in scale, and much of it has been rebuilt or altered in the twentieth century. But it is genuine. People live here. Workshops operate in spaces barely large enough to contain a single craftsman. Bread is baked in communal ovens. Cats sleep on warm masonry walls.

The medina also puts the French city in perspective. When Henri Prost drew his plan in nineteen fourteen, he built a wall — a physical boundary — between the Arab city and the new French city. The two were to develop separately, each according to its own logic. This segregation was deliberate policy: the French called it respect for tradition, their critics called it a refusal to integrate. The truth was probably both simultaneously. What is certain is that the two cities grew up side by side for over four decades, profoundly aware of each other, profoundly separate.

Independence in nineteen fifty-six dissolved the administrative boundaries but not the physical ones. The medina is still the medina. The boulevards are still the boulevards. And the city that grew up around both of them dwarfs them both.

The exterior walls are white render rather than stone, giving the building a clean geometric brightness more Mediterranean than Northern European. The windows are elongated lancets framed in carved plaster, their tracery patterns lifted from Islamic geometric art rather than from Chartres or Notre-Dame. The twin towers flanking the main facade have a profile that reads simultaneously as bell towers and minarets — the same Janus-faced quality you have been seeing all morning, but here executed at the grandest possible scale.

Step inside if the door is open. The interior is cavernous and cool, the walls bare of the Gothic stone carving you might expect. Instead, the decoration is concentrated in the window tracery and in the floor patterns — geometric, restrained, Moroccan in spirit even when the overall volume is recognisably that of a Christian basilica.

The French Catholic community that built this church left Morocco at independence. The building was deconsecrated and handed over to the city. It has housed various cultural uses since then — currently an art space and venue — which is perhaps the most honest possible fate for a building that was always already about two cultures trying to speak to each other across an architectural divide.

And the strange thing is: it works. The Habous is genuinely pleasant in a way that self-conscious heritage recreations rarely are. The streets are narrow but not claustrophobic. The arched passageways create shade and rhythm. The proportions of the buildings — two to three storeys, white render, green-painted doors and shutters — are correct in the way that comes from real understanding of how traditional Moroccan domestic architecture distributes light and ventilation.

The neighbourhood today is primarily known for its craft workshops and shops: leather goods, ceramics, carpets, woodwork with geometric inlay called zouak, embroidered textiles. The quality is genuinely high compared to the tourist bazaars of the more famous medinas. The craftsmen here are working in a tradition that the Habous was specifically designed to preserve and support.

In the centre of the quarter is the Mahkama du Pasha — the regional court and administrative palace, completed in nineteen fifty-two and one of the great buildings of late Protectorate architecture. Its interior contains rooms of extraordinary craftsmanship: carved cedar ceilings, walls encrusted in tilework and carved plaster to a height of three metres, mosaic floors. It is occasionally open to visitors, and if you have the chance, go in.

The Habous reminds you that the French Protectorate was never a simple story. Alongside the suppression and the economic extraction, there were individuals who genuinely loved Moroccan art and architecture and devoted themselves to understanding and preserving it. The result was complicated, as all colonial histories are complicated. But it was not nothing.

The technical achievements are remarkable. The minaret is topped by a laser that projects a beam toward Mecca each night — a navigational piety visible thirty kilometres into the Atlantic. The prayer hall floor can be opened hydraulically to reveal the ocean beneath: the building is partly constructed on a platform over the sea, and the idea was that worshippers should pray over water, fulfilling a verse from the Quran that states the throne of God was built on water.

Moroccan craftsmen worked for years on the interior, which is among the most elaborate ever attempted: over fifty thousand craftsmen from across the country contributed carved stone, plaster, cedar, mosaic, and bronze. The zellige tilework alone required the skills of hundreds of traditional artisans working in the maallim tradition.

Some critics found the mosque's scale overwhelming, its ambition straining the boundary between the magnificent and the grandiose. Others see it as a legitimate continuation of the tradition of great Moroccan patronage architecture — the Koutoubia, the Hassan Tower, the Ben Youssef Madrassa — extended into the twentieth century. Both readings have merit.

From the corniche, you see the minaret against the Atlantic. The sea light here is extraordinary — silver and blue and constantly shifting. Casablanca means White House in Spanish, and on a bright day the white render of this mosque and the city behind it earns the name completely.

None of this appeared in the film. The Humphrey Bogart film was shot entirely in Hollywood, on Warner Brothers soundstages, using a cast that included precisely zero Moroccan actors in significant roles. The Casablanca of the film — the smoky nightclub, the ceiling fans, the desperate refugees, the cynical American with the hidden heart of gold — was a fantasy of North Africa assembled from backlot sets and studio imagination. The real Casablanca was busy running a war.

The cafe you are looking at now was opened in two thousand and four by an American woman named Kathy Kriger, a former diplomat who loved the film and wanted to create a physical version of the place it imagined. It is decorated with period-appropriate furniture and memorabilia, serves decent Moroccan food and cocktails, and sometimes has live music. It is, in the most literal possible sense, a tribute act — a real building built in homage to a fictional one.

And yet it has become a genuine part of the city. Casablanquois have adopted it with affectionate irony. Tourists arrive expecting Humphrey Bogart and get excellent bastilla and a very good pianist. The bar where Sam never played never has been converted into a bar where a real musician plays beautifully. The fake has become real through thirty years of use.

This is, in its way, the perfect final note for a tour of a city built on productive fictions — a French city built to look Moroccan, a new medina built to replace the old one, a colonial architecture that tried to be both master and student at once. Casablanca has always been in the business of building the city it imagined itself to be. Rick's Cafe fits right in.

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, you walked into this one. And it was worth the walk. Safe travels.