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This project, situated in a central location within the Casablanca Finance City campus, seeks to build a genuine and vibrant urban fabric around the campus’s main tower. It is imagined as a series of sutures between the campus’s public spaces (main street, square, and various smaller side streets) and built spaces. A variety of possibilities were explored in developing this approach, including in-depth analyses of the nature of the project’s urban block, density and height, prospect reports, and vertical stratification.
Although the project seems to demand two separate buildings—the project site is comprised of two separate and non-contiguous plots—the two plots are strategically treated as part of a single entity. A common floor shared by both buildings attaches the two, transcending the physical boundaries between the two lots and presenting a unified urban front facing both the street and a park. Also shared between the two buildings are program elements, including a shared restaurant and cafe, whose public access give the “island” between the two buildings a public prerogative. The architectural language of the project is sober and restrained, and anchored in the great tradition of concrete invention in Casablanca.