21 May - 7 June 2025 | Fes, Milano, Ziz Valley. 

In the 1930s, Henri Terrasse collected sketches, photographs, and texts that described the landscape of the Atlas Mountains and the oases of southern Morocco, highlighting their nature as a physical and cultural boundary. In the 1960s, a group of Dutch architects Kasba 64 retraced Terrasse’s footsteps and published, in 1974, Living on the edge of the Sahara, which collects surveys, photographs, and sketches that describe the forms of dwelling and the settlement types of these places “on the edge of the desert”. When William Curtis decides, in the 1980s, to retrace the footsteps of his colleagues in the lands of the South, he brings us back similar refections. The hostile landscape at the edge of the desert, fed by a watercourse system, is the physical background for the settlements and, at the same time, a condition to protect from. From the douar to the medina, passing through the igerm, the agadir, the ksar, the tighremt, and the kasbah, the enclosure is considered as the archetype on which the elements of the settlements are composed. More or less fortifed, the settlement types of the Moroccan South are defned by the necessity to protect from the surrounding hostile territory and, at the same time, to maintain a clear separation between the nomad world, represented by the open and unlimited space of the desert, and the sedentary space of human settlement. Historically, Arab and Berber populations have inhabited and defned these places, often meeting and sometimes confronting each other. Today, these places are in a state of advanced decay, or, conversely, they are often the focus of frequently creative restorations intended for touristic purposes. Recent visits to these areas have uncovered a completely altered landscape. Today, other settling models, which prioritize environmental exploitation over a clear exchange relationship, irremediably compromise the fragile relationship between production capability and settling conditions that guided the construction of the landscape until a few decades ago. This phenomenon of indiscriminate transformation is not only continuing, but is also dangerously transforming the valleys of the Moroccan South. Based on the study of the two historians (Terrasse and Curtis) and the four Dutch architects (Kasba 64), the workshop aims frst to investigate the architectural landscape of these places and, secondly, to redesign some portions of it, demonstrating that an alternative to the uncritical transformation of the landscape and its settlements is not only possible but also desirable.