* | Marcello D’Olivo, La Peyre, Libreville, Gabon, 1964.
Bringing the past into the contemporary public buildings is generally based on mor-
world is a complex intellectual operation,
which requires solid, carefully thought-out
reasons. It is not a matter of copying or
reproducing but rather a logical process of
encoding a new form of architecture. The
transposition of ancient materials into the
present is brought about by citations, but also
by hybrids, metamorphoses and the rewriting
of pre-established elements that can be reas-
sembled in a new order. The meanings they
are given are often different from the ones for
which they were originally designed.
It is a search for a formal construc-
tion code which, once mastered, needs to be
betrayed. Dialogue with the past is based on
a process of recognition and sharing, but the
principle of modernity is necessarily implicit
in the choice of elements, in the way they are
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170 assembled and in the semantic transforma-
tions that are brought about.
These elements, which Fathy used to create
| africa | big change | big chance |
his own language, are fragments extracted
from the repertoire of tradition, which he
viewed not as a fixed, unchanging set of rules,
but rather as a living material with which, and
on which he could act, allowing for change
when necessary. The space-time limits of
the tradition to which he referred are often
unspecified: in his view, the ancient architec-
ture of the Pharaohs, the spontaneous Nubian
designs, those of the Nile or the desert, the
buildings of medieval Cairo and, more in gen-
eral, those of the world of the Arab koine all
had the same value, coexisting in single atopic,
timeless dimension, where tradition is rewrit-
ten and comes to life in a contemporary world.
What ultimately matters is thus the
appropriateness not so much to a particular
place as to a reinterpreted setting, which is
itself rediscovered and, through architecture,
reinvented. A place that is Egyptian, Arabic,
and North African.
In New Baris, for example, the village is given
the feel of a traditional town by the study of
ancient Arab urban structures, which are then
created using similar processes, governed by
abstract, pre-established geometric rules. On
the other hand, the design of domestic spaces
is based on an analysis of Arab and Mediter-
ranean homes, reassembling and reinterpret-
ing their long-established spatial structures
to create a new order. Finally, the design of
phological memory.
Of these, the market is one of the
few buildings to have been completed and it is
particularly interesting for the way it illustrates
one of the methods adopted by Fathy to work
on tradition. A possible model for the market
is in fact the rab, a sort of generic caravanse-
rai. And yet his different approach contrasts
with the symmetry and introversion typically
found in the khan. The courtyard loses its
role and appears as an accessory space at the
service of the individual trading units. These,
which form the main part of the building,
occupy only one side of the enclosure and are
arranged in a line along a covered road, thus
recalling the idea of the suk and contradicting
the courtyard type which, at first glance, the
project appears to adopt. The other three sides
|
of the enclosure are occupied by service areas, 171
mostly for the storage of goods. It is thus clear
that the original point of reference is deprived
| architectures of modernity |
of its meaning and that, after being emptied of
its semantic significance, only the formal prin-
ciple – the memory of its form – is retained.
This reinvention of a type thus leaves only an
original imprint on the ground, suggesting
a possible structure that acts as a guideline
in the compositional process. It does not,
however, abandon its symbolic implications
and its ability to create an architecture with a
very clear identity with regard to its cultural
context.
Ethiopia, 1965.
* | Zalman Enav & Michael Tedros, Filoha Baths, Addis Ababa,
andré ravéreau. the m’zab, future cities
of the sahara | Daniela Ruggeri
—
Excavated in the desert plateau of the wadi,
about 600 kilometres south of Algiers on the
edge of the northern Sahara, lies the valley
of the M’zab. “The region is named after the
Chebka, which in Arabic means “network”.
Rain erosion at the beginning of the quaterna-
ry carved the plateau into a network of wadi
that cut the rock in every direction” 1. A. Ravéreau,
Vallée du M’Zab, Cahiers du Centre Scientifique et Technique du
bâtiment, 64, 1963, p. 1..
Just before Algeria gained its
independence, the Agence du Plan d’Alger
scheduled the drafting of an urban plan (Plan
Directeur General) for the valley of the M’zab
under the direction of Gérald Hanning. The
 architect André Ravéreau, an expert on the
valley who had just finished rebuilding two
villages struck by an earthquake on the island
of Cephalonia, was contacted in 1960 to assist
Jean-Jacques Deluz and Robert Hansberger in
drawing up the plan.
During one of his training trips,
Ravéreau had got to know the M’zab very well
and was fascinated by it. His love of architec-
ture came when he travelled to Algeria, but
also during a stay in Italy while studying at
the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he
made friends with some of his future com-
panions at the Atelier Perret. These included
Eliane Castelnau, the architect of the Centre
d’Hygiene de Bab El Had in Rabat. At the Per-
ret, Ravéreau showed a natural preference for
the design of construction details: “I had the
habit of designing details – for me it was an
|
172 intuitive process and I designed in morceaux,
or bits. When Perret came to me to make
corrections, I would show him these pieces
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[...]. He guided me towards what still inspires
me today: starting from construction details,
from the materials, from the elements ... the
ingredients that will ultimately form a har-
monious whole [...]” 2. A. Ravéreau, Du local à l’universel,
Linteau, Paris 2007, pp. 15-16..
Despite his pronounced aptitude for
detail, Ravéreau began his career drafting an
urban plan. The valley of the M’zab is a com-
plex system, with a dry climate and arid land.
It is unsuitable for human settlement, and it
was for this very reason that it was chosen by a
group of religious dissidents who, when driven
out of the city of Tiaret, took refuge here in
about the year 1000. Here everything is urban-
ised and every detail reveals the work carried
out by the community to make it liveable.
“The M’zab is an exile from exile: the Ibadis,
the first people to occupy the Chekba, first
left Tiaret to go to Sedrata with its six
hundred thousand palm trees, giving up the
pleasures of their homeland with its stuc-
coes and its springs, and deliberately going to
settle in a valley that the rains forget for years
on end” 3. M. Roche, Le M’Zab. Cités millenaire du Sahara,
Esparon 2003, p. 11..
Together with his wife and partner,
the photographer Manuelle Roche, André
Ravéreau drew up an inductive interpretation
of the territory, which contrasted with the
taxonomic approach of the surveys made in
the same year by the CIAM-Alger group 4. M. Ris-
selada, D. van den Heuvel, Team X: 1953-81: in search of a Utopia of
the present, Rotterdam 2005..
By redesigning, and using
the precious video and photographic docu-
mentation made by Roche, Ravéreau broke the
valley down into its constituent parts:
· The ksours: these ancient villages with forti-
fied ochre walls were built in the mountains
for defensive purposes but also to control
the flow of the stream in the valley 5. A. Petruc-
cioli, Dar Al Islam. Architetture del territorio nei paesi islamici,
Carucci, Rome 1985, p. 71.. The M’zab has five ksours
within a five mile radius: El Ateuf (“the most
ancient”), Bou Noura (“the luminous”), Beni-
Isguen (“the holy”), Melika (“the queen”) and
Ghardaïa (“the new-born”), which gave the
pentapolis its name.
· The water management system: without it,
the wadi, which floods violently every ten
years, would destroy any form of settle-
ment. “The whole architectural character
of the M’zab was influenced by the need for
extensive water management, making it a
top priority, with dams, wells and channels
for irrigation that are unparalleled anywhere
in the desert” 6. A. Ravéreau, Le M’Zab, une leçon
d’architecture, Arles 2003, p. 83..
· The palm groves: these constitute a specially
organised form of vegetation. The houses,
with their gardens and orchards, where the
population normally moves during the hot-
ter months, are placed within them. This is
why Ravéreau calls these areas “la ville d’été”
– the summer town.
· The cemeteries and communal prayer areas:
these large white level areas near the ksar
mark the transition towards the desert.
The parts that make up the valley, as
described so far, are the elements that Ravé-
reau made use of in his urban plan, breaking
them down and sometimes reassembling
them with a change of function. Within the
general plan, he was also able to formulate
two levels of detail (the Plan Detail): one for a
new square in Ghardaïa and the other for the
enlargement of Beni-Isguen, and he also pre-
sented a project for a school of architecture in
Bou Nourà.
His projects reveal the insights, and perhaps
also the ingenuousness, of a French architect
making his debut, using Western design in-
struments such as zoning and applying them
on the ground in Africa. And yet the Directeur
et Detail plans contain some original solu-
tions, with particular attention paid to the
landscape and to traditional local architecture.
As a design tool in the M’zab, Ravéreau intro-
duced the method of creating visual angles,
which was considered as innovative in French
urban planning at the time. It is hard to say if
this was a concept he had unconsciously ac-
quired during his brief stay in Greece, where
he saw the designs by D. Pikionis, in which
the use of this compositional instrument
is evident, or if he picked it up while in the
firm of Pikionis’s pupil, C. Doxiadis. Choisy’s
L’Histoire de l’architecture certainly used this
device to explain “the Greek picturesque”.
Ravéreau’s personal reformulation of the
method is in any case interesting, as is the use
he also makes of it in his interiors.
The design of the square in Ghardaïa
is the redevelopment of a former military
manoeuvre area. The group of administrative
buildings is coupled with a series of buildings
and dispositifs designed to create interact-
ing forces that bring the square to life during
the various hours of the day. These include
shops, cafés and an outdoor cinema on the
roof-terrace of a building. The layout of the
square is based on the fundamental principle
of favouring views of key elements in the area,
such as the minarets of Ghardaïa and Melika.
Of this project only the post-office building
was actually built. Experience acquired on
the site helped pave the way for the design,
the following year, of the villa of Dr M. Also
the Villa M can be considered as part of the
urban plan, for it stands in the area set aside
for the new residential zone in the palm grove
between Ghardaïa and Beni-Isguen.
In Beni-Isguen, the project for the
enlargement area included a new boundary
wall. This wall was built not for military but
for religious reasons, in order to establish a
boundary and to prevent any future un-
controlled expansion. In this way Ravéreau
continued the tradition of M’zab and, more
generally, of Islamic towns, where, urban con-
glomerations are closed entities and not too
extensive, in order to facilitate their admin-
istration. When the population density be-
comes too great, communities prefer to move
elsewhere and to found a new city rather than
enlarge the existing one.
The new enlargement areas designed by
Ravéreau were closed elements that ran for
five kilometres along the wadi, following the
contours and blending into the landscape.
This was therefore a model that, consisting of
finite elements repeated infinitely, could also
be applied in other oases, showing the broad,
far-sighted vision of the project.
However, the system was not applied in the
desert, where the discovery of oil and the
great influence of Western culture has led to a
form of urban expansion that pays little atten-
tion to the land and that destroys the oases.
The parts of the project that Ravé-
reau formulated most completely appear as
fragments and the buildings actually con-
structed appear sporadic, whereas in actual
fact they form part of a single project. They
are perhaps those morceaux from which,
ever since his apprenticeship at Perret, the
|
architect usually started when composing a 173
harmonious whole.
| architectures of modernity |
luigi w. moretti . hotel el aurassi in
independent algeria | Eleonora Carrano
—
The Hotel El Aurassi (1968-1976) ushered
in the final period of Luigi Moretti’s career,
which was brought to an end by his works
in independent Algeria. These include about
three hundred projects which constitute a
heritage of Italian architecture in the service
of a country that was creating its own iden-
tity.
Interacting with the separatist elite in Algeria
when it was still under French rule, Moretti
made a name for himself in Paris in the mid-
1950s at an international conference on the
Casbah of Algiers. The young Algerian intel-
lectuals with libertarian ideas who noticed
and understood him went on to play a leading
role in the life of the country during the early
years of independence. It was they who, on a
visit to Rome ten years later, asked him about
the most pressing issues concerning construc-
tion, starting with the Hotel El Aurassi.
“The Aurassi”, declared the Algerian
Minister of Public Works M. Lamine Khène
on 18 March 1969 to the “El Moudjahid”
newspaper “est devenu une affaire nationale.” It
became a national affair because the building
site, which was opened in the early 1960s for
a project by the Egyptian Moustapha Moussa
 * | André Ravéreau, Villa M, Ghardaïa, Algeria, 1967-68.
but then suspended for eight years, embodied
Algeria’s desire for visibility. Through the im-
age offered by modern, efficient and grandiose
buildings, including the Congress Building
in Club de Pins and the Aurassi – the young
Republic was freeing itself from Soviet power,
joining Third World countries and hosting the
Conference of Non-Aligned Countries. It was
indeed an “affaire nationale” which needed
to be quickly resolved, and in 1968 it was
entrusted to Luigi Moretti.
The construction of the El Aura-
ssi was an extremely complex task, because
of its monumental size and its ambitious
programme, and because of the structural er-
rors made during the early stages of building.
There was also the risk of tarnishing of the
country’s political image since the construc-
tion site was at a standstill. The history of
|
174 the construction of the building was indeed
fraught with difficulty and came when Moretti
was having health problems, which prevented
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him from supervising the works. When he
died, on 14 July 1973, the building was still not
finished and it became fully operational only
in 1976.
Moretti first started work on the
project and on the existing site in 1969. In a
situation where only disproportion appeared
relevant – the original plan provided for a
five-storey building partially built up to the
fourth, which was to act as the base for a
* | Hassan Fathy, New Baris Village, Kharga, Egypt, 1967.
twenty-storey tower – Moretti worked on the
idea of an independent building which would
encapsulate the complexity of the situation as
he found it. He started work on the structure,
taking the project to its technical limits, with
precise, clear systems, with no excess or af-
fectation in his construction techniques.
The development of the project
shows how, as well as the structural layout,
Moretti arranged the support system, the
a huge five-floor base, to create a sense of
rhythm that would be consistent with the
order given to the upper floors. This avoided
having a different set of rules from those that
had already been established: his aim was to
distinguish the horizontal platform below
from the construction that rests on it. In
order to achieve this, the volume of the hotel
shifts asymmetrically towards the northern
edge of the base, leaving a wide open area
to the south. This gives it emphasis, clearly
indicating the correspondence between the
horizontal profile of the base and the projec-
tion of the block above.
The design of the structural system
is one of the key aspects of the project and it
is plain to see in the façade: above the plinth
area, which consists of vertical elements that
are repeated alternately with glazed surfaces,
the building gradually thickens as it rises: an
open arcade on the third floor and continu-
ous masonry fronts on the floors of the hotel
constitute a sort of huge attic. And yet,
even though the relationships between the
horizontal planes of the base and those of the
hotel are different, for the vertical elements in
the base break up its horizontal nature, there
is no sense of arbitrariness, but rather one
of consistency and compositional skill. The
|
progression from solid to void and back to 175
solid, with the mediation of the large terrace
with its roof garden on the fifth floor and
| architectures of modernity |
the arcaded area is attributable to Moretti’s
interpretation of Michelangelo: the weight
is placed at the top, as we see in the palazzo
volante, the “flying palace” in Corso Italia in
Milan (1951-53) and in the twin office build-
ings for the EUR district in Rome (1963): “[...]
The thought of making a large edifice that
expresses violence and is present in certain
moments, and in others expresses abandon-
ment, and endless repetition, like you see in
a Chinese manuscript, or a Greek colonnade.
...I am clever enough not to think that the eye
tires of seeing a continuous floor repeated,
because it is perceived too readily and requires
that only a small part of it be seen. So, clever
person that I am, I broke the flight in two,
inserting a neutral zone between them and
above everything else, finally creating a peace-
ful zone, after which there is only sky and
requiem! They are therefore two large, linear
perspectives of disappearances and presences,
with the closure of the weight above, as Mi-
chelangelo would have wanted. [...] To all of
this I add the fact that, to appear as a scatter-
ing and a presence, it was to make no contact
with the ground but, on the contrary, it was to
rise up like some strange, enormous plant.”
Moretti chose his materials and the
treatment of the façade in order to reinforce
the visual consistency of the complex and
consolidate the order of interactions. He