Brutalism and its afterlives

By the time I started looking for the work of the Moroccan modernist architect Jean-François Zevaco, I got the sense it was already looking for me.

I’d arrived in Casablanca late Friday night with my younger daughter, en route a couple of days later to Fes, where she’d signed up for three weeks of Arabic study and homestay. We spent the weekend adjusting to the time change and walking around Casablanca, whose populace seemed, to a person, to be readying itself for Morocco’s opening World Cup match on Saturday, against mighty (though this year not quite so mighty) Brazil.

I’d put out a brief call at the end of last week’s Punch List for recommendations in Morocco, Spain, and Portugal, where I’ll be traveling over the next couple of weeks. A tantalizingly simple one came in from David Shone of Vancouver’s Patkau Architects: Did I know Zevaco? He cited the Moroccan-born, Toronto-based Younes Bounhar, who with his wife, Amanda Large, runs an architectural photography agency called doublespace.

According to David, Younes had described Zevaco as “definitely one of the best architects you’ve never heard of.” I later had the chance to connect via Zoom with Younes himself, a Casablanca native, who generously offered to share some of the photographs that accompany the newsletter this week.

By the time David’s email came in, on Saturday evening Morocco time, my daughter and I had already spent some time wandering around the neighborhood near our hotel, at the foot of Casablanca’s giant central park, now called Parc de la Ligue Arabe but long named for Hubert Lyautey, France’s resident general in Morocco from 1912 to 1925, under whose auspices it was redesigned beginning in 1913.

On a side street, Rue d’Agadir, just off busy Avenue Hassan II, I noticed a kind of market hall on one corner. At ground level it looked typically Moroccan, with cafes and produce stands spilling out of a connected row of concrete storefronts. But in the air it turned into something else entirely. A dozen or so blade-like concrete slabs, each hoisted on its own substantial concrete column, shaded the shops below while nestling together to form an uncommonly striking silhouette.

I next did that thing that the children of architects and architecture critics the world over are familiar with: I asked my daughter to stop and wait for a couple of minutes while I gawked at Compelling Architecture, wandered through it, took photos of it, and rattled doorknobs obnoxiously to see if they’d give way.

Back at the hotel, reading David’s note on my laptop, I grabbed my phone to scroll through some of those photos. Could it be? A quick Google search confirmed it: Zevaco, from 1972. Drawings from the collection of the Frac Centre give a clearer sense of its logic: 13 columns arranged in a loose grid, protecting a warren of shop buildings, some of them arcaded as they face the street.

The architecture rings with clear echoes of experiments in structural engineering like Frank Lloyd Wright’s offices for the Johnson Wax company, built three decades before in Wisconsin, though Zevaco’s is a more horizontal composition. But what really struck me about the design is the way it brings together modernist and traditional motifs without insisting that either give up their autonomy. This is an exercise in juxtaposition, not reciprocity.

You could even read the project as a whole as a commentary on Europe’s relationship with Morocco, suggesting from certain angles a cooperative or sympathetic modernism, from others a doctrinaire or domineering one.

And how could it not be such a commentary, given the source? Zevaco had a foot in both worlds. Born in 1916 in Casablanca to a French family, he studied architecture in Paris and Marseille before returning to Morocco after World War II. The first phase of Zevaco’s career was buoyed by the post-war investment that poured into Casablanca and other Moroccan cities. An early breakthrough was 1947’s Villa Suissa in his home city, which the late historian Jean-Louis Cohen, who knew Zevaco’s architecture well, called “a hedonistic firework display of modern materials.” In the early 1950s, Zevaco joined the Group of Moroccan Modern Architects, or GAMMA, a North African branch of the influential CIAM.

Zevaco’s mature work dovetailed almost perfectly with the heady early years of Moroccan independence, which the country won (or recovered) from France and Spain in 1956. (His later work was more rational in its interiors, perhaps, but never abandoned a flair for the dramatic; also near my Casablanca hotel was a 1979 tower Zevaco designed for an insurance company, AXA, that has a spiky facade studded with angular windows. Looking up at it from the sidewalk is like peering into a shark’s mouth.) He designed villas, factories, mosques, schools, courthouses, commercial buildings, and an airport for the new Morocco—something like 150 projects in all.

What unites this diverse body of work, above all, is a sculptural imperative—a desire to use sophisticated and sometimes experimental structural engineering to produce formal gestures that are typically muscular, rendered as they are in concrete, but first and foremost have a kind of calligraphic clarity. Often those gestures literally supersede (from the Latin supersedere, to sit atop) utilitarian spaces at ground level. The result is an unusual hybrid, mixing the heft of Brutalist projects by Le Corbusier or Breuer with the optimism and, in some projects, the gymnastic flair of Latin American or West Coast modernism. 

Take the gas station Zevaco designed at a wide intersection in Marrakech, just outside the walls of the medina, in 1958. I stumbled onto it in much the same way I did the Agadir Street Market. Having decamped to Marrakech after Casablanca and Fes, I decided unwisely to walk across the city around 5 p.m. yesterday to reach a Carrefour market. The sun was punishing enough that I was shielding my eyes even though I had sunglasses on. I cut through a gas station, to save maybe twenty seconds of walking time. I looked up past the pumps, where a handful of locals were filling up their motorbikes, and saw a shell-like concrete roof arcing dramatically over a simple concrete service building.

I scurried to find some shade and pulled out my phone. Zevaco.

The concrete shell rose at each end from a stone-aggregate base, in a leaping manner that channeled Niemeyer while also seeming to prefigure Gin Wong’s famous Union 76 station in Beverly Hills, from 1965; the Tramway Gas Station in Palm Springs, by Albert Frey and Robson Chambers, from the same year; and Santiago Calatrava’s more recent (and much grander) experiments in winged modernism in Valencia and Lower Manhattan. Historical photos of Zevaco’s station reveal that the horizontal walls under that roof, placed in a V shape in plan, were also originally stone, though they’ve since been painted white (and that a circular hole at the apex of the roof, which I puzzled over, was designed to accommodate a flagpole). Similarly, what had been a marvelously open storefront, framed by concrete walls, is now closed in by glass, currently covered by large-scale race-car graphics.

If the gas-station design lost some of its elemental boldness over time as it was reconfigured and adapted by generations of users, the change is nothing compared to what’s happened to Zevaco’s most ambitious and best-known project, a spa complex built around the mineral springs of Sidi Harazem, about ten miles east of Fes. 

In 1957, just after independence, the Caisse de Dépôts et de Gestion (CDG), a state-owned bank, commissioned Zevaco to design a hotel, shops, public swimming pools, bungalows, and other facilities in Sidi Harazem, whose springs have been a destination for travelers since ancient times. On Tuesday evening, my daughter safely delivered to her Arabic school, I took a taxi from the main train station in Fes to see the complex.

It was 90 degrees out and just beginning to cool down. Climbing out of the shallow bowl of a valley where Fes sits, the taxi passed a large walled cemetery squeezed onto a hillside. We soon found ourselves in a pastoral, if very dry, landscape of rolling hills; it looked like Santa Barbara County after 99 years of drought. We sped past sheep, then camels.

We arrived at Sidi Harazem just as the sun, mercifully, was setting. The driver dropped me at the top of the extensive complex, which steps down a gentle hillside before settling at the bottom of its own valley. The first element I encountered was the bold concrete vertical sculpture that serves as an entry marker for the whole ensemble. If you squint a little—and I, with blue eyes, am always squinting here—it resembles a human figure: long concrete arms topped by a squared-off, concave concrete head.

From there I walked down into the heart of this strange Brutalist village, on which Zevaco worked for a reported decade and a half. A path through a kind of latter-day souk is topped by a lattice of thick concrete frames. It leads to a number of overlooks and landings, some of which offer views down to the circular public pool below, which along with the entry tower has become a visual symbol of the project as a whole. To the east is a hotel building, a great Brutalist slab, lifted on thick concrete legs, that is the most Corbusian element of the ensemble.

The hotel, interior photographs of which suggest a kind of Scarpa-esque attention to hardware and tectonics, appeared shuttered; I wasn’t even able to find an open path to walk beneath it. So, on my visit, was the pool complex, drained of water. This is not to suggest that Zevaco’s masterwork has been abandoned. To the contrary, the al-fresco shops threading through his concrete maze were thronged. Kids begged their parents to buy them trinkets, and families strolled up and down the stairs leading to the pools.

In 2017, the Getty Foundation announced that it was including the complex at Sidi Harazem in that year’s Keeping It Modern grant program, which is dedicated to preserving vulnerable 20^th-century architecture around the world. The $150,000 award was to be administered by the CDG, which still owns the complex, and a design team led by the Moroccan architect Aziza Chaouni, who teaches at the University of Toronto. Two years later, in the fall of 2019, Alexandra Lange wrote an excellent piece for the New York Times checking in on Chaouni’s plans, along the way exploring some of Zevaco’s personal and professional history—as well as Chaouni’s.

(Chaouni did not respond to an email.)

The Getty grant, at $150,000, was of course not meant to restore Zevaco’s work, only to generate a report spelling out ways that the complex might be revived both architecturally and economically. According to Lange, Chaouni’s ideas include architectural tours led by teenagers from the area as well as “a new Zevaco-inspired covered market for local farmers to sell foods including snails, mushrooms, grilled corn and tagines.”

As those plans await full implementation, the complex exists in an unusually lively kind of limbo, as a busy ruin, full of people and activity but not reflecting a great deal of reverence, in the ways it has been reconfigured, for Zevaco’s architecture. The merchants working beneath his expansive concrete scaffold, selling plastic water jugs, gas cans, key chains, and grilled meat, have filled in its gaps with signage, curtains, and a dizzying array of plastic tarps, as some of Younes’s superb photographs make clear.

I am not sure if the site as a whole is less or more vulnerable than when it made the Getty’s Keeping It Modern list. What may exist here for some extended period, instead, is a stunning relic of a particular strain of architectural and national ambition, adapted for everyday use with a benign disregard for its original soaring vision.

This condition is, of course, familiar to anyone who travels regularly to look at significant works of architecture, in the United States as surely as on the outskirts of Fes. There is no guarantee that future users of any important landmark will respect, or even be aware of, its architectural pedigree, no matter the era or style; great buildings the world over have been subject to the indignity of being used in ways their architects would have shuddered to imagine. The Parthenon, to pick the most famous example, operated as a temple, a cathedral, a mosque, and a gunpowder storehouse before taking on its current role as tourist destination. Palladian villas have become military barracks and convents; the Colosseum was for a time a residential village. 

And the fate of Zevaco’s design for Sidi Harazem may have been sealed from the start. The architect after all tucked major swaths of it beneath a series of connected concrete lattices that—however eye-catching for architects, structural engineers, and critics—make a ready, hardy scaffolding for just the kind of contemporary marketplace that now dominates the space. Meanwhile the hotel operates as a kind of Brutalist billboard, striking but mute, for the complex as a whole, framed romantically by the palms and oleanders that periodically stir in the anemic June breeze.

Sincere thanks to Younes Bounhar and doublespace photography for generously sharing these photographs.

News & Notes

A nice pairing with Zevaco, but looking south of the Sahara: MoMA will open “Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa,” curated by Martino Stierli, Ikem Stanley Okoye, and Mallory Cohen, on July 5.

RIP Lorcan O’Herlihy, the Irish-born architect whose firm helped remake Los Angeles residential architecture over the last two decades with an eye toward stylish multifamily living, including the excellent Formosa 1140 project in West Hollywood and a controversial condo building next door to the Schindler House. He died Sunday at 66. Sam Lubell wrote this appreciation for the L.A. Times; Madeleine Brand talks with Frances Anderton about O’Herlihy here.

Grace Farms, best known for its SANAA-designed home base in New Canaan, is opening a cafe on the ground floor of the JPMorgan Chase headquarters on Park Avenue, a space where “guests can enjoy organic beverages, pastries, and seasonal offerings while experiencing a space rooted in connection, community, and purpose.”

Guess what? The ballroom Trump promised would be built for $400 million and entirely privately financed might cost $600 million, with half of that coming from taxpayers. Expect both the price tag and the public’s share to grow.

One of the trickiest parts of covering the architectural and urban ambitions of the Trump administration is its sheer capriciousness. Some projects, like the ballroom, hurtle forward past all objection while others, equally if not more alarming, are suddenly abandoned. Case in point: ICE, having bought 11 warehouses around the country with an eye toward converting them into immigration detention centers, is now trying to offload most of them.

Before the algae started to grow, bleach briefly turned the Reflecting Pool into an accidental Rothko.

Zaha Hadid Architects is now ZHA, marking a formal end to the much-litigated requirement that the firm pay a royalty of six percent of annual net income to the Zaha Hadid Foundation.

This essay by my friend Alex Ross on Frank Gehry, Gustavo Dudamel, and James Conlon—on farewells and departures of all kinds, really—is lovely. (And I’m not just saying that because he quotes me, on Disney Hall, in the first graf!) He calls Gehry “the greatest builder of concert halls of modern times.” Alex, who has been busy, also has a new piece wrestling with the legacy of Habermas.

A Russian painter and Putin critic was killed in Poland, and this brief New York Times item on his death seems to be working extra hard against Occam’s Razor.

Heathcote on Backrooms. Like Shane Reiner-Roth before him, he cites “Junkspace.”

I’m quoted in this CNN piece by Oscar Holland on the Trump-friendly architecture of a federal courthouse planned for Chattanooga.

London borrows a housing-financing model from Singapore.

“Isn’t an architect just an art-school dropout with a tilty desk and a big ruler?” The Bulwark talks about the White House, architecture, and George Costanza—and somehow misses the obvious Art Vandelay reference.

Punch List is published weekly. Subscribe free here, or sign up for a paid subscription, with bonus material, here.

Email: [email protected]