Historicizing spontaneous city. Michel Ecochard and the « habitat pour le plus grand nombre » in Morocco
Résumé
In 1953 Michel Ecochard presents at IX CIAM the “Habitat pour le plus grand nombre” grid, based on CIAM grids to investigate morphologies and settlement process of Moroccan spontaneous cities. Explicit indication of these as “sources” of design expresses a double shift for Modern design. The first one is clearly perceptible in the present of Ecochard’s project proposal: dealing with traditional urban space, organized according to “internal” principles and characterized by an informal and minute status, Modern architects move from an universalist design model to the declination of a contextualized method. They capture urban history, they understand its characters and they encode Mediterranean spontaneity formula applying Athens Charter principles. Thus, experimented design introjects the self-organized urban structure, based on the principle of minimum resistance, in the formulation of a planned hetero-organization.
The second shift can only be understood decades later. Took over by the population, Ecochard urban fabrics have been spontaneously adapted, leaving a sustainable legacy to Morocco (J.-L. Cohen, 1992): an evolutionary urban form based on a rooted path, and a typo-morphological paradigm. Through the transformation, Ecochard gives rise to a building typology and to an urban morphology, codified and replicated to manage urban expansion in the following years. The short present of Ecochard’s action in Morocco (1948- 1956) reverberates in the compression between his past and his future. In the solid roots that refers, with functionalist lucidity, to the intuitive structure of the Mediterranean space, and in new urban forms occurring thereafter in both planned action and informal city.
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