The cohesive core of Casablanca, Morocco, is unmatched by few city centres and shows how modernism can be used to its full potential on a large scale, says recent visitor Aaron Betsky.

At the corner, the white box fractures. A bay window at the base, framed with stone, in the floors above turns into an intersection of diagonal planes covered in stucco, while the mass to one side of the corner erodes into balconies whose balustrades tie the whole back together. Windows, framed and punched into the façade, punctuate the smooth stretches on one side of the apartment building, while corner windows pull the building apart around the corner.
All of that happens in a few metres of just one of hundreds of apartment buildings that make up the city of Casablanca's modernist core. Mixing streamlining with arcades, turrets with abstract blocks, and stucco with coloured tile, these early 20th-century buildings together make up a composition of seamless urbanity. This building, which Betsky describes in detail in his opening paragraph, is one of many examples of modernist architecture in Casablanca
Casablanca presents one of the best models of modernism as a way to build and house a city that combines order and excitement, mixes cultures, and offers a dream of metropolitan possibilities. That was my impression from walking around the city's centre a few weeks ago with Aicha El Beloui, an architect whose work consists of drawing and thereby drawing out the possibilities of her hometown,...