Aziza Chaouni, an exceptional Moroccan Woman
at the service of her Medina.
(English translation of Au Fait Magazine article, March 8, 2007.)
The Moroccan architect Aziza Chaouni graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is the director of the research board of DOCO.MO.MO Maroc, a chapter of an international organization that seeks the preservation of the modern heritage. Her awarded project investigates the relationship between infrastructure and the urban fabric in the context of Middle-Eastern historical centers, the Medinas. In doing so, it proposes a new model of intervention in historic districts, one that is integrative and uses an experimental architecture that develops formal and programmatic innovations from an otherwise highly loaded and restrictive milieu.
The Medina of Fez, Morocco, founded in 786 and proclaimed a world heritage city in 1981, offers an excellent ground for such an investigation. Indeed, while its urban fabric is almost entirely preserved and its economic activity is still thriving, it contains moments of severe infrastructural disjunction.
The Medina of Fez nestles in a steep valley and is bisected by the Boukrareb River. In 1969, half of the river was covered by the French architect Ecochard and turned into a vehicular road, creating a bottleneck condition at the very center of the Medina and restraining access to the banks of the uncovered part. Moreover, this enterprise caused the destruction of several lots along the river axis, creating both a discontinuity of the compact urban fabric and moments of schism between the old street network and the vehicular road.
At the beginning of the 1970s, the University El Qarayine, which had constituted the main cultural and spiritual center of the Medina, was dismantled and moved to the outskirts of the Ville Nouvelle. This intervention deprived the medina of its major historical landmark and cultural outlet, which not only offered several public lectures a week and a space for encounters, but symbolized the pride of the local population.
As a solution, this project proposes a university organized as research centers placed along the river axis, connected to a heterotopic network of classrooms embedded into the existing urban fabric and built on sites presently containing collapsed buildings. The role of each research center is twofold: to resolve the infrastructural rupture existing along the river axis and to offer public programs that can be shared by the community of the Medina.
Each chosen site is an exercise on how the University could act both as an urban connector and as public space, catering to the changing need of a population that longs for modern forms of leisure and service.