Casa Port

Casablanca is one of the modern world capitals, a white city with a centre that, like Tel Aviv and Sao Paulo, seems to result from the construction of a large number of Art Deco and International style buildings within a short timeframe; the product of a large living experiment conducted in times of great change, the colonial input is expressed via Modernist indifference and attempts to draw on the vernacular for any new architecture.

Yet, this extremely emancipated city has always lacked the most symbolic of Modernist  locations: a railway station. The major Casablanca-Voyageurs hub may have the Moorish look but its size and secondary position outside the city centre have undermined its ability to become a true icon and gain status as a gateway to the city. The Casa Port station, on the other hand, does serve the function of a central station but has never stood out as a building. Quite the reverse, indeed. Although adjacent to the medina, the maritime station and the heart of the city, it has always remained in the background. Its Modernist sign, capably completed by a bus terminal, has grown ever more anonymous as the port – today one of the largest on the Atlantic – has expanded.

This void in the city’s imagery is now being filled by a new Casa Port station designed by AREP, a design office formed in the late 1990s as part of the SNCF group by engineers and architects Jean-Marie Duthilleul and Etienne Tricaud. With a workforce of more than 600 architects, urban designers, engineers, economists, designers and programmers, this multidisciplinary structure has designed numerous stations, including many in China and Korea, the successful Porta Susa station in Turin and the recent refurbishment of the Gare St. Lazaire in Paris (a particularly successful example of a local-network railway station combined with retail spaces).

The AREP project in Casablanca forms part of a much-debated programme of works to create a high-speed rail link between Tangiers and Casablanca, an operation costing nearly two million Euros and the fruit of an agreement between France and the Kingdom of Morocco that envisages not only infrastructure support but also the supply of rolling stock and TGV Transalpino technology. The new Casablanca-Port station also aims to be the first completed project on the city’s new waterfront, a vast process that inserts a new international district between the sea and the medina, between the immense Neo-Moorish Hassan II mosque and the big-hotel zone. Providing office spaces with a marina and twisted skyscrapers, foreign investments are expected to pour in as too tourists, alighting from the trains of the future.  

AREP’s adopted strategy is similar to that of Gare St. Lazaire in Paris: hugely fluid spaces, a lowering of the existing levels, retail areas on the lower levels and natural light and ventilation taken to the deepest levels. The new passenger building is easy to navigate for those rushing to catch a train or exiting for a taxi. Flooded with light but also protected by a large continuous timber-clad roof, transit and waiting become fluid and enjoyable experiences for passengers. Reminding visitors that they are in North Africa is a long mashrabiya on the exterior of the west front. This regional touch, made of prefabricated concrete panels, revives the tradition of the Modernist interpretation of vernacular architecture so recurrent in the history of the white city.

With this new gateway to the waterfront and an international district under construction, the question remains as to what contemporary form Morocco wants to give itself today: that of convenient global imagery that turns its back on the bustle and poverty of the informal city despite embracing its signs, or an attempted mediation between the economy of these worlds and an effort to extend their quality standards to all social strata. The desires and true ambitions of the masses in emerging countries – which, it must be said, greatly appreciate AREP’s spaces where they find cleanliness and universal restaurant and clothing chains without the drawback of entering into contact with the city – remain a more political than economic choice. Working on the imagination does, nonetheless, make an impact and it is no coincidence that the solutions featured in the AREP design are strongly echoed in a project by Favero & Milan Ingegneria with Abdr and Italferr that recently won the competition to refurbish the Casablanca-Voyagers station: a glass box covered with a large mashrabiya roof. “Play it again, Sam…”

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New railway station Casa Port, Casablanca, Morocco
Program: railway station
Architetct: Etienne Tricaud, Philippe Druesne, Christophe Iliou – AREP e Groupe3 Architectes, Omar Tijani, Skander Amine
Completion: 2015