Centre de prévention routière

Morocco's National Committee for the Prevention of Traffic Accidents wanted to create the country's first centre of its kind: a pilot facility where people learn to drive in theory and practice, including after passing their test. Learners train on test tracks that reproduce the main situations met on the road.

The site lies along a national road on farmland between Casablanca, Mohammedia and Rabat. The brief set two requirements: keep as much land as possible for the tracks, and give the centre a strong presence in an open landscape. Our answer was a landscape-building: a single L-shaped line holding the corner of the plot.

The ground floor, in concrete walls, is open and permeable. It carries an upper floor clad in weathering steel, which reads as a thick roof and unifies the whole. The programmes are independent but connected: teaching and administration, an auditorium that can run on its own, catering, training garages and plant rooms. A diagonal interior street links them, continues outside as a promenade and passes through garden courtyards. You enter under the arch formed by the rake of the auditorium, and from there the view runs all the way to the tracks.

The palette is deliberately limited: tinted concrete, raw metal and large glazed openings, in the colours of the Benslimane soil. The building includes sunshades on the east, west and south façades, natural ventilation, cork insulation and rainwater harvesting.