“By tracing its trajectory from Casablanca to Berlin, attempting to reconstruct the relationship between the Free University, often considered the prime representative of what later became known as the ‘mat-building’ typology, and the North African ‘casbah,’ the paper explores how the visual or perceptual, emphasized during interactions between the narrative’s protagonists or disseminated through architectural publications, played a salient role in popularizing the idea in European circles.”

Publication: “‘Casbahism’ in Europe: the Journey of an Architectural Idea,” in The Visibility of Research, Proceedings of the 2013 ARCC Spring Research Conference, March 27-30, 2013. Architectural Research Consortium, University of North Carolina Charlotte School of Architecture (March 2013).

Keywords: scholarship, mat-building, typology, casbah, architecture, vernacular, design, genealogy, history, historiography, CIAM, Atbat Afrique, GAMMA, CIAM, Team 10, Morocco, Algeria, Peter Alison Smithson, Le Corbusier, Candilis-Josic-Woods, Freie Universität, Fee University, Berlin, Germany, modernism, post-WWII, Southwest Asia (”Middle East”), North Africa, Arab world

Image: Amin Alsaden