Learning from Djemaa el-Fna

Abstract

The essay explains the role of the urban landscape of fragmented modern cities, and proposes to remove superfluous and unnecessary features built into urban stratifications in order to better remark the original essence of the space. Thus, landscape will still propose the value system of a specific society without any kind of fake or imitation, and public space should overcome its own crisis of identity born with our car civilization and the reduction of spatial distances.

Learning from the existing landscape is a way

of being revolutionary for an architect.

Not the obvious way, which is to tear down Paris

and begin again, as in Le Corbusier’s suggested in 1920s,

but another, more tolerant way;

That is, the question how we look at things

(Venturi et al. 1972).