ABSTRACT
The study of Modernism in Morocco continues to employ a bifurcated paradigm that is overdetermined by political history. As a result, the modernist movement is fractured by the axis of 1956 into two disparate phenomena: the fi rst, embedded in the colonial political discourse rooted on the legitimizing concept of “civilizing mission,”1 the second expressing the modernizing aspirations of the newly independent Moroccan state. Such stress on political events leads to a misleading periodization, which implies a discursive as well as a formal disjuncture. Ultimately, possibilities of architectural continuity, legacy, and fertilization are veiled (Figure 1).
