In Morocco, Salima Naji, an architect of the common good

Salima Naji strokes the centuries-old sides of the wall of the Kasbah with her hand, moved by these ramparts heavy with history once again erected on the imposing promontory which dominates the bay of Agadir, in Morocco. A line, drawn like a thick pencil stroke, zigzags along the enclosure. “It’s the line of pain that separates the walls that remained standing from the upper part, which had collapsed,” she testifies.

Because she is also an anthropologist, the architect, who is completing the restoration project of the vast fortress, took care to keep the memory of the drama that took place there. The bodies of 600 to 800 people were buried under a screed of lime inside the fortification after the terrible earthquake of February 29, 1960, which caused between 12,000 and 15,000 deaths among the 35,000 inhabitants of the city. All the buildings then badly constructed, in earth as in concrete, collapsed. “The earthen walls, partly still standing, demonstrate that they last for centuries! exclaims Salima Naji.

“I am a woman, it’s exotic”

For more than twenty years, the Franco-Moroccan architect, a graduate of the Paris-La-Villette school, has been plowing this land to rehabilitate this discredited universal material despite its virtues of sustainability, ecology and climatic comfort. Even architectural gems – such as the Alhambra palace in Granada (Spain) or the walls of Rabat, his hometown – have been sent back to their past, “fossilized in a heritage vision, like cenotaphs”.

“Yet in an earthen building, you feel the freshness, you are enveloped by the softness of its walls. This sensation, the architect experiences it each time she enters her house made up of winding corridors, an interior courtyard and skylights that provide light and air circulation. “My house, I have made it my laboratory. Everyone is afraid that the earth will crumble with the first heavy rain. Making it last requires expertise and technicality but, well maintained, it can last for centuries. Rammed earth is earth so compressed that it becomes an earthen stone. »

Alas, under the protectorate, European cities, with all the modern comforts, relegated to the background the so-called “indigenous” cities, left unhealthy, where Moroccans were crowded. “At independence, no one wanted to live in the shack anymore. Modernity has been associated with Europeanness, local materials have become shameful, linked to poverty, and cement has spread everywhere,” laments Salima Naji. According to her, the result of the obsession of a generation of men who have made concrete the spur of modernity.

“I am a woman, it’s exotic. “And terribly difficult to exercise a profession of man, in a macho and patriarchal country. Hasn’t a governor recently scolded her husband, judging that “a woman should not say no to a man in public”? No matter her expertise, and her many prizes, no matter that she restored ksours (fortified villages), mosques, collective granaries, that she wrote many books (1), and a doctoral thesis in anthropology on collective granaries.

Draw inspiration from ancestral techniques

Faced with adversity, Salima Naji had no choice but to be a radical: in her approach and her convictions to defend architecture as “a common good”, concerned with the dignity of living and the spirit of the place, with buildings inscribed in their social and environmental context and built with natural materials of earth, stone, wood and plants available at hand. “An architecture of collection”, she defends, against “an architecture above ground in reinforced concrete”, consuming fossil energies, source of bad development by ignoring the climate, the culture and the environment.

Parisian to the core, Moroccan to the very core of her being, she staunchly defends another idea of ​​modernity, namely “keeping the best of the old by bringing innovation and comfort”. It thus perfects the immense architectural legacy. At the casbah, the new constructions for the reception of the public are inspired by ancestral techniques and comply with paraseismic standards thanks to… wooden beams positioned as a staircase in the walls erected in dry stone. “I do paleo-innovation. To do better than the old ones is my hubris! »

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His reasons for hope. “We are coming to the end of the concrete building”

“France also turned its back on the land in the name of modernity at the end of the war, despite a rich architectural heritage like that of the La Croix-Rousse district in Lyon. But attitudes are starting to change. We are coming to the end of the concrete. There is a real desire to redevelop the earth sector. In Morocco, after long lobbying, raw earth and earthquake-resistant stone were authorized by decree in 2014. I was able to form a network of small businesses using local materials. There remains, in Morocco, France and elsewhere, the problem of design and control offices reluctant to these vernacular techniques – stone, raw earth or terracotta, rammed earth or adobe – which are not standardized and which they do not master, and for which they refuse to issue ten-year guarantees. »

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