Casablanca Art Deco Architecture: A Native's Guide
to the City's Modernist Heritage

Casablanca Beyond the White Façades

As a native of Casablanca, I have long felt that many of the city's most remarkable buildings are passed every day without receiving the attention they deserve.

The city is often described, by marketing copy and guidebooks alike, as Morocco's "Art Deco capital." That description is not wrong, exactly, but it is incomplete in ways that matter. Casablanca does contain one of the largest concentrations of early twentieth-century modernist buildings in Africa. But those buildings span several distinct styles, several decades of construction, and the work of a large number of architects — French, Moroccan, and otherwise — whose individual contributions have been absorbed into a single convenient label.

This guide attempts something more precise: to help you see these buildings clearly, understand what they are and are not, and appreciate the Moroccan craftsmanship that was integral to their construction. It also includes a practical self-guided walking route, notes on the preservation struggle, and an honest account of the city's ongoing architectural challenges.

Is Casablanca Really an Art Deco City?

The short answer is: partly. Casablanca does have a remarkable quantity of buildings from the Art Deco period — the late 1920s through the early 1940s — and some of them are genuinely outstanding examples of the style. The Cinéma Rialto, the Immeuble Assayag, and numerous residential buildings along the city's inner boulevards would be notable in any European city.

But the "Art Deco city" label obscures as much as it reveals. Many of the buildings most often photographed and marketed as Art Deco are better described as neo-Moorish or arabisance — a French architectural style that deliberately incorporated Moroccan decorative traditions into European structures. Others are Streamline Moderne, a simplified successor to Art Deco that arrived in the late 1930s. And from the 1950s onward, Casablanca produced a body of postwar modernist work — particularly associated with Jean-François Zevaco — that has almost nothing to do with Art Deco at all.

The term is also sometimes applied to buildings that are simply old and ornate. An elaborate façade from 1912 with eclectic European ornament is not Art Deco. A building with horseshoe arches and zellige tilework is neo-Moorish. Understanding the difference is the first step to seeing the city clearly.

How the Protectorate Transformed Casablanca

In 1912, when the French Protectorate was established over Morocco, Casablanca was a port town of modest significance. Within three decades it had become the economic capital of French Morocco, with a population and built environment that bore almost no resemblance to what had existed before. The physical record of that transformation — the civic squares, the boulevard architecture, the residential districts — is still largely visible today.

The agent of this transformation was Henri Prost, a French architect and urban planner who had won the Prix de Rome in 1902 and had developed wide experience in urban planning theory. In 1913, Resident-General Hubert Lyautey invited Prost to develop comprehensive urban plans for Morocco's principal cities, including Casablanca. Prost would remain in Morocco for approximately a decade.

Prost's approach was guided by a principle that distinguished him from many of his contemporaries: rather than demolishing or overriding the existing medina, he developed a separate new European city alongside it. This dual-city structure — French ville nouvelle running parallel to the existing Moroccan town — explains the spatial logic of Casablanca's protectorate-era districts. The buildings described in this guide are concentrated primarily in the ville nouvelle zone, particularly around Place Mohammed V and along the radiating boulevards.

Albert Laprade, who worked under Prost, later reflected that the goal was to develop "an elegant urban architecture based on modern technology that would be appropriate to the stylistic tastes and way of life of the Moroccan people." Whether protectorate urbanism achieved or approximated that goal is a question of ongoing scholarly and political debate. What it produced architecturally is the subject of this guide.

A documentary companion to the architectural history described in this guide. Hosted on YouTube; opens without tracking cookies in this embedded format.

How to Recognise Art Nouveau, Neo-Moorish and Art Deco

Standing in front of a Casablanca building built between 1910 and 1950, the following guide may help you identify what you are looking at.

Place Mohammed V and Its Civic Ensemble

Place Mohammed V — known during the protectorate as Place Administrative — is the natural starting point for any architectural exploration of Casablanca. The square was conceived as the civic heart of the new ville nouvelle: a formal ensemble of public buildings that would give the city's new institutions a monumental address.

The buildings that surround the square were not built simultaneously, and they represent several different architectural moments. What unifies them is the consistent use of neo-Moorish elements — horseshoe arches, zellige dados, carved plaster, green-tiled roofs — applied to modern concrete structures. The effect is a coherent civic space without being a uniform one.

The Central Post Office (Grande Poste)

The Central Post Office — the Grande Poste or La Poste Centrale — was the first building completed at the new administrative square, with construction running from 1918 to 1920. Its architect was Adrien Laforgue, and the style is what archival records describe as neo-mauresque: a neo-Moorish design in which the building's modern function is expressed through a vocabulary drawn from Moroccan architectural tradition. The University of Michigan's architectural archive holds design drawings from this period documenting Laforgue's approach.

Notable features include the zellige tilework on the façade, the green-tiled cornice, the decorative mosaic panels at the main entrance, and — inside, for those who enter — a cedar ceiling with a substantial brass chandelier. The building remains in use as a post office.

The Palais de Justice

The Palais de Justice was designed by Joseph Marrast and completed around 1925, according to archival records held at the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris (ArchiWebture reference FRAPN02_MARJ). It stands on the south side of Place Mohammed V and is one of the most impressive buildings of the civic ensemble.

Marrast's design is described in contemporary documentation as Mauresque — a blend of Art Deco structural logic with decorative elements derived from Moroccan and Andalusian traditions. The building's massive arched entrance, its ornamental ironwork, and its tiled surfaces demonstrate how the protectorate's principal architects attempted to fuse European modernity with local form. It functions as a court building and is not accessible for tourism.

The Wilaya — the provincial administrative headquarters — contributes one of the square's most memorable vertical elements: a minaret-like tower at its corner that reads as neo-Moorish from a distance and reveals, close up, a careful integration of modern concrete construction with traditional surface treatment: horseshoe openings, zellige panels, carved plaster screens. The Bank Al-Maghrib, Morocco's central bank, occupies another of the square's principal positions, its building reflecting the same broad formal language of modern structure clothed in Moroccan decorative tradition.

Spend time simply standing in the square and looking at how the four main buildings address each other — their heights, their proportions, the consistency of their roof lines. Whatever one thinks of the politics of protectorate urbanism, the square is architecturally coherent in a way that many civic spaces of the same era are not.

Boulevard Mohammed V: The Open-Air Architecture Gallery

Boulevard Mohammed V extends north from Place Mohammed V toward the old medina and the port. Walking it, you move through what amounts to an uninterrupted sequence of early twentieth-century buildings — residential, commercial, institutional — that spans almost every style described in this guide.

The boulevard's architectural density is its most important characteristic. Buildings from the 1910s stand beside buildings from the 1940s; neo-Moorish civic structures face Streamline Moderne apartment blocks; ornate eclecticism gives way to the more restrained geometry of later Art Deco. No single style dominates, and no two consecutive façades are identical. This variety is the product of the many different architects who worked in Casablanca during the protectorate period, each interpreting the city's architectural brief in their own way.

The covered arcades that line parts of the boulevard — providing shelter from both summer sun and winter rain — are one of the district's most liveable features, and a reminder that the protectorate-era planners were designing for a Mediterranean climate. Walking the boulevard, look up at the upper floors rather than the shop-front level: the architectural ambition of the period is far more evident above the commercial ground floor.

Essential Buildings of Central Casablanca

Cinéma Rialto

The Cinéma Rialto, at 35 Rue Mohammed El Qori, was completed in 1929 according to designs by the French architect Pierre Jabin. The building is documented as Art Deco in style and was designed to seat approximately 1,350 spectators across its main floor and characteristic mezzanine level. The architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen's 2002 study Casablanca: Colonial Myths and Architectural Ventures is the principal academic source for the Rialto's documentation.

Despite its age and changes of use over the decades, the building's Art Deco character has remained essentially intact through successive renovations — a relatively rare situation in a city where many comparable structures have been substantially altered. The Rialto was reported to have closed as a functioning cinema around 2019, but it continues to attract visitors as an architectural landmark. Its future use is, at the time of writing, uncertain.

Immeuble Assayag

The Immeuble Assayag, documented by Mutual Heritage Casablanca (Université de Tours) and by the building's own institutional records, was designed by the architect Marius Boyer and constructed between 1930 and 1932. Boyer was one of the most prolific architects working in Casablanca during the interwar period, and the Assayag is among his most substantial surviving works.

The building's structure is notable for its composition: two sections — of eight and four storeys — separated by an interior street above an underground garage. On the main façade, three connected blocks step down in a sequence of terraced forms that create large outdoor terraces on the upper levels. The result is a building that reads as Art Deco in its ornamental language while demonstrating, in its section and plan, the kind of technical ambition that made Casablanca a significant city for modern architecture.

Immeuble Liberté

The Immeuble Liberté — known locally by the informal name "17 étages" — represents a different moment in Casablanca's architectural history. It is consistently attributed to the architect Léonard René Morandi and documented as constructed between 1949 and 1951, marking it as a postwar building rather than a protectorate-era one. Its seventeen storeys made it one of Casablanca's most recognizable early high-rise landmarks.

The building is relevant to an architecture guide because it illustrates the transition from the Art Deco and Streamline Moderne language of the 1930s toward the more assertively modern approach of the 1950s. It is not, strictly speaking, an Art Deco building, and should not be described as one.

Immeuble Liscia

The Immeuble Liscia is attributed to the architect Pierre Jabin — the same architect responsible for the Cinéma Rialto — and is associated with the former Cinéma Lux. Sources disagree on its date: Mutual Heritage Casablanca documents it as 1937, while Casamémoire's current records describe it as a 1930 building. Rather than resolve this disagreement artificially, it is more accurate to say the building dates from the 1930s and leave the specific year as a matter for further archival research.

The photograph shown here depicts a corner façade with elaborate protectorate-era decoration; its identification as the Liscia building has not been independently confirmed through visual comparison with documented archival photographs. It is included here to illustrate the character of Casablanca's inner-boulevard corner buildings from this period.

Marché Central

The Marché Central is a functioning market and a useful reference point on the architecture route. Its building reflects the same broad formal language of the interwar period — a covered commercial structure in a style that blends practical function with the neo-Moorish and modern aesthetic that characterized Casablanca's civic and commercial construction. It remains one of the most animated spaces in the central city and a natural place to pause between architectural observations.

Moroccan Craftsmanship Within the Modern City

The architecture of protectorate-era Casablanca is sometimes described as French architecture with Moroccan decoration applied to it. That description misrepresents what actually happened. The construction of the ville nouvelle depended on the labour and craft knowledge of Moroccan artisans who had been practising their trades — in some cases across generations — long before any French architect arrived in Morocco.

Zellige — the geometric mosaic tilework produced by hand-cutting small pieces of glazed terracotta into shapes and assembling them into geometric patterns — appears on the façades and interiors of many of the buildings described in this guide. The craft requires considerable skill and a body of pattern knowledge that is specific to the Moroccan tradition. The craftsmen who produced the zellige on the Grande Poste, on the Palais de Justice, and on the Wilaya brought that knowledge to what were otherwise modern construction projects.

Carved plaster — gebs — is similarly a Moroccan craft tradition. The carved plaster screens, arches, and surface treatments that characterize the neo-Moorish buildings of Place Mohammed V and the Habous quarter were executed by Moroccan artisans trained in techniques that predate the protectorate by centuries. The same is true of the cedar woodwork that appears in the interiors of many civic and residential buildings: coffered ceilings, carved screens, and decorative doors.

This is not to suggest that protectorate architecture was a collaboration of equals — it clearly was not, politically or economically. But to treat Moroccan craft as mere decoration on a French architectural frame is to misrepresent the material reality of how these buildings were made. The craft traditions of Morocco were not applied to European buildings; they were brought into European-designed buildings by Moroccan people who knew things that the architects did not.

Habous and the Neo-Moroccan Experiment

The Habous Quarter — also called the Nouvelle Médina — is architecturally distinct from the rest of protectorate-era Casablanca, and it is worth making the effort to visit separately.

Its origins: Albert Laprade, working under Henri Prost, was given the task of planning a new indigenous residential district for Casablanca's growing Moroccan population — a district that would be separate from the French ville nouvelle and designed according to different principles. Laprade made extensive drawings of local architectural forms and spatial arrangements before developing his plan. The actual construction began in 1919 and was carried out by architects Auguste Cadet and Edmond Brion, who continued the project for many years. The district's name refers to the habous — charitable endowment properties held by religious or community institutions — that provided the original land.

The result is a quarter built with modern materials — reinforced concrete, modern sanitation infrastructure — but organized according to traditional Moroccan spatial logic: narrow covered streets, courtyard-centred houses, separate women's and men's paths through the public space, communal facilities including markets, ovens, mosques, schools, and public baths. It is neo-Moorish in the literal sense — a new thing made to look old — but it was conceived with more serious attention to the social and spatial traditions it drew on than most protectorate-era design.

Walking the Habous quarter today, you encounter a neighbourhood that feels genuinely different from the ville nouvelle: quieter, more residential, organized at a human scale. The shops around the central market area offer an accessible entry point, and the architecture of the streets behind them — the arches, the zellige dados, the carved plaster screens — repays careful attention.

The Former Church of the Sacred Heart

The former Church of the Sacred Heart — commonly but imprecisely called Casablanca Cathedral — was designed by Paul Tournon and begun around 1930. Its unusual architecture combines a modern structural approach with Gothic and Moroccan-influenced elements: the building has the vertical ambition and pointed arches of Gothic tradition, but the surface decoration and certain formal details suggest an awareness of local architectural vocabulary. It is not a tidy stylistic category.

It was never technically a cathedral: the term "cathédrale" came into popular use, but Casablanca was not the seat of a bishop when the church was constructed, making the designation formally incorrect. The building is documented in secondary sources as having closed in 1956, following Moroccan independence, when it ceased to function as a place of worship.

Today the building operates as a cultural venue — exhibitions, concerts, and cultural events have been held in its interior. This active cultural use is part of what makes the building worth visiting; rather than standing as a preserved relic, it has a continuing life. What access and programming are available changes; do not assume any particular exhibition or opening will be in place when you visit.

The former Church of the Sacred Heart should not be confused with Villa des Arts, a separate Art Deco villa and contemporary art institution elsewhere in central Casablanca.

From Art Deco to Modernism: Jean-François Zevaco

Jean-François Zevaco was born in Casablanca in 1916 and died there in 2003. He is the most significant architect associated with the second phase of Casablanca's modernist architecture — the period from the late 1940s onward, when the language of Art Deco had run its course and a new generation of architects was working under the influence of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Oscar Niemeyer.

Zevaco received his architecture diploma (DPLG) from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1945 and returned to Morocco in 1947. Over the following decades he produced a body of work notable for its structural expressiveness, its response to the Moroccan climate — particularly the quality of light — and its willingness to experiment with form in ways that distinguished it from the more conventional modernism of his contemporaries.

In 1980, Zevaco received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture — one of the field's most prestigious international prizes — in recognition of his career achievement. His archives are held at ArchiWebture, the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine's architectural archive centre, under reference FRAPN02_ZEVJE. The academic study most closely associated with his work is Jean-Louis Cohen and Monique Eleb's Casablanca: Mythes et Figures d'une Aventure Urbaine (Hazan, 1998).

Zevaco's buildings are not concentrated in the same zone as the protectorate-era architecture described in this guide, and visiting them typically requires specific navigation to individual sites. They represent a distinct chapter in Casablanca's architectural history — one that deserves a separate guide of its own.

Hôtel Lincoln: Heritage Under Rehabilitation

The former Hôtel Lincoln on Avenue Mohammed V is one of Casablanca's most closely watched heritage rehabilitation projects. It is relevant to this guide both as an architectural subject and as an illustration of what the preservation of protectorate-era heritage looks like in practice.

Casamémoire, the Casablanca heritage association, registered the Hôtel Lincoln as the first building in its heritage inventory in the year 2000 — a designation that underscored the building's significance while raising awareness of its deteriorating condition. In subsequent years, the building suffered structural damage, with reports of a partial collapse following a storm in 2009 leaving portions of the structure unusable. The site remained largely inactive for an extended period.

In January 2026, Radisson Hotels announced that the Hôtel Lincoln would be rehabilitated and reopened as Lincoln Casablanca, a Radisson Collection hotel, with a planned late-2026 opening and 120 rooms. The development is being carried out by Réalités Group. As of early 2026, when this announcement was made, the site was under active construction. Readers should confirm the current status of the project before visiting, as no opening date should be treated as guaranteed.

Whatever the outcome of the rehabilitation, the Lincoln's story is instructive: a building identified as significant by the city's heritage community, allowed to deteriorate for two decades, and eventually taken up as a commercial rehabilitation project by an international hotel group. Whether this outcome represents the best possible use of the building is a question that Casablanca's architectural community continues to discuss.

Casamémoire and the Preservation Struggle

Casamémoire — in Arabic, ذاكرة الدار البيضاء (the memory of Casablanca) — was founded in 1995 by Jacqueline Alluchon, a response to the demolition of Marius Boyer's Villa Moqri, a significant Art Deco building that was destroyed amid what Alluchon and others experienced as general official indifference to the fate of the city's twentieth-century heritage. The organization's official website is casamemoire.org.

The association's objectives, as stated in its founding documents, are to raise awareness in public opinion and among the city's decision-makers about the value of twentieth-century architectural heritage, and to advocate for the restoration and rehabilitation of significant buildings. Since 2009, Casamémoire has organised an annual Heritage Days programme — three days per year during which volunteer guides offer free visits to architectural sites across the city.

In 2015, Casamémoire achieved official NGO status with UNESCO consultative recognition, giving the association a formal platform in international heritage discussions. The organization has been working toward a UNESCO World Heritage nomination for Casablanca's protectorate-era urban fabric — a process that, if successful, would provide international legal protection for a large number of the buildings described in this guide.

The preservation situation in Casablanca in 2026 remains active and contested. Demolitions continue in the city's historic districts. The gap between the architectural significance of the building stock and the resources available for its maintenance is large. Casamémoire's work — documentation, advocacy, public education — is, in this context, essential rather than supplementary.

A Practical Self-Guided Architecture Route

How to Explore and Photograph Responsibly

Almost all of the buildings described in this guide are either government buildings, functioning commercial premises, or occupied residential buildings. None are tourist attractions in the conventional sense, and none offer public interior access as a general rule.

Photograph from the street. Do not enter lobbies, courtyards, or residential buildings without explicit invitation. Do not ask doormen, residents, or passing strangers to let you in. The people who live and work in these buildings are not props for architectural tourism.

The best light for photography in Casablanca is in the early morning and the last two hours before sunset. Midday light in summer is extremely harsh and flattens the surface detail that makes these buildings interesting to photograph. In summer, plan your walk for the early morning; in winter, the afternoon light is more useful.

Several of the buildings noted in this guide are adjacent to construction sites or areas of active urban development. Be aware of your surroundings and of temporary access restrictions that may not be signposted clearly in advance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources and Further Reading

The following sources were used in the preparation of this article. Where a fact has not been confirmed from a primary source, it has been qualified in the text.

• Cohen, Jean-Louis (2002). Casablanca: Colonial Myths and Architectural Ventures. Monacelli Press. ISBN 1-58093-087-5. — Primary academic source for Casablanca's protectorate-era architecture; cited for the Cinéma Rialto, Grande Poste and broader urban history.
• Cohen, Jean-Louis and Eleb, Monique (1998). Casablanca: Mythes et Figures d'une Aventure Urbaine. Hazan. — French-language companion study; principal academic source for Jean-François Zevaco's work.
• ArchiWebture, Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris. Palais de Justice Casablanca documentation (reference FRAPN02_MARJ): archiwebture.citedelarchitecture.fr. Jean-François Zevaco archive: FRAPN02_ZEVJE.
• University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Central Post Office / 1918-1920 / Laforgue, Adrien: quod.lib.umich.edu.
• Mutual Heritage Casablanca (Université de Tours). Immeuble Assayag documentation: mutualheritage-casablanca.univ-tours.fr.
• Casamémoire, official website: casamemoire.org.
• Radisson Hotels press release, January 2026: radissonhotels.com. — Lincoln Casablanca rehabilitation announcement; Q4 2026 target opening.
• Blondeau, Mathilde; Joundy Ouazzani, Kenza (2016). Casablanca courts-circuits. Editions Ethnic Attitude. ISBN 9789954377505. — Source for Cinéma Rialto historical programme references.
• Wikipedia, "Albert Laprade" and "Henri Prost" — used to locate primary sources; not used as independent evidence for architectural attributions.