Mirroring The Environment

Rima Alsammarae speaks with architect Driss Kettani, whose contemporary designs blend into the Moroccan landscape

 

I always try to find the poetic dimension of architecture,” says Moroccan architect Driss Kettani, who established his eponymous Casablanca-based architecture studio in 2005. “It’s important to me, because architecture doesn’t have to be cold or systematic, or like a machine. You have to have something poetic, and you have to find it.”

The Fes-born architect spent his childhood in Côte d’Ivoire and, though his family had always hoped he would return to Morocco, it wasn’t until his university days that he visited the beaches of Rabat and the cascading white buildings of Casablanca.

After graduating from the École Nationale d’Architecture in Rabat in 2003, Kettani took a year off to travel and freelance. In 2005, he set up his firm – Driss Kettani Architecte – and today has completed projects across various sectors, including education, residential and office, as well as dabbled in furniture design.

“My first big project was the Taroudant University. I worked on it with my friends and partners, Saad El Kabbaj and Mohamed Amine Siana. We were young and only had our separate offices for a year then. The project was four years of very hard work, so it’s a special one for me.” Completed in 2010, the Taroudant University follows a structural layout and architectural aesthetic that would later come to characterise Kettani’s work. Blending into the environment of southern Morocco, the building, like his others, features wide but short volumes and boasts the colour of diaphanous sand brown.