Mud wall cities and architecture in southern morocco: Some thoughts as to restoring and conservation

Abstract

The earthern, mud wall architecture and the settlements built of the same to be found usually south of the Atlas range in Morocco are commonly called Kasbas. This name, which properly belongs to a type of construction, is generally applied to buildings which, though having a similar form, enjoy differing functions, as do the tigrement, kasba, ksour and igherem, differences which the paper tries to define by pointing up the structural contrast among them derived from the differing uses to which they are put. An attempt is also made to trace their origens and that which has influenced them, be these structures from antiquity or modem and European considerations, this while insisting on those autoctonous features proper to the culture that created them. Given the lack of such information as would allow for their dating, and approximation is attempted as to what would seem to be the periods in which they best might have been built. The overall intention of the paper is, however, to consider the problems that any conservation of mud wall building offer us, this along with an appeal for interest in the same given the progressive delapidation of these architectural groupings, they here being seen as part of Mankind's Heritage rather than the concern of but one country. Further to this, the paper is felt to be a pretext for some thoughts as to both the restoring and conservation of historical architecture, arguing that such activities are aloways understood within the context of the needs of Western Cultures. Thus the problems of stable cultures are imposed, in a conceptually most inappropriate way, upon that of a world that did not build to last bud did build in keeping with its own traditions, habits and behaviour, a world, however, that lives on the border line of poverty. Here then, as in almost all restoring initiatives, the risk of fossilizing an evocative past is born of the demands for enlivening a shaken present, the which, though quite in keeping with Western Society here is not for what is truly called for is something illuminated by a sense of historical continuity.