Inhabitable Ruin

Abstract

The development of Casablanca can be understood through two major shifts in its history; colonization and de-colonization. During the first shift, city divided into culture specific urban areas in which new alien urban structures built to control and satisfy the needs of diverse cultural groups. During the second shift, these culture specific habitats became occupied by the same culture, in other words, they became mono-cultured. Due to these radical cultural shifts the implanted urban structures became unattended even though some of them were able to continue their lives in the society by transforming and adapting to the new context. However, the ones that couldn’t transform become isolated and created morphological and programmatic voids in the central and dense areas of the city. Roman Catholic Churches are one of those urban spaces with an exception of a free-standing closed architectural space inside. These churches have been chosen because of their formal repetitive character which is potentially can be used as common resource for the city and, they have been seen as an opportunity to operate on both open and closed spaces together. However, because of its the rigid-ritualistic sacred form, the roman catholic church offers a finite space that does not allow undetermined uses to happen. In other words, the potentiality of these abandoned areas’ in urban scale does not meet what their form offers in architectural scale. In this sense projects tries to answer the questions of;
1- How to re-examine and re-signify the repetitive-rigid forms of Roman-Catholic Churches in the changed reality of the city?
2- How to make these ruins habitable by operating on their formal structure without designating a certain use, while still retaining their un-programmatic nature?
3- How to add another segment to the sequence of church-form typology that is viable for Casablanca?