Each new building (the southern wall, the cultural center, the northern boundary, and the garden complex) interprets the city’s traditional courtyard typology through a dialogue between massive earthen walls and light wooden porticoes. Together, these elements transform the mechouar into a unified public space capable of evolving over time, maintaining both memory and openness

The southern limit of the mechouar is redefined by a simple yet symbolic architecture that sets the tone for the entire project. Replacing the existing structures beside Bab er Robb, this new wall reestablishes the gate’s original function as a threshold between city and exterior, while offering a shaded space for rest and gathering beneath its delicate wooden portico. Its modest proportions and raw materiality express the project’s fundamental language. 

The cultural centre inhabits the square. Though it does not physically open onto it, it communicates with the other architectures that occupy it. It creates what perhaps this space has always lacked: a large, serious-looking building, appropriate to underscore its solemnity, that enriches this area of Marrakech with a grand venue for the public, a container of culture and knowledge, a place for dialogue and discourse through art and communication.  The cultural center is organized in two main sections. The ground floor contains reception areas and a partially sunken conference hall that opens through a glass wall onto a secluded walled garden, creating a quiet link to the medina walls and royal property. Above it, two suspended levels form an independent courtyard building, framed by deep wooden porticoes and loggias that reinterpret the modest structures found at the mechouar’s entrance. Inside, a rhythm of light and shadow defines the experience: the first-floor exhibition rooms open discreetly to the courtyard and are lit by soft, indirect daylight, while the upper level hosts a sequence of narrow galleries illuminated by skylights. 

The northern edge of the courtyard is defined by an inhabited wall that reestablishes the boundary between the medina and the kasbah, reviving the memory of the ancient Almohad mechouar where political and civic life once converged. Set slightly farther north than the original limit, the new wall respects the kasbah’s perimeter while reshaping the proportions of the square. Behind its wooden façade lie two levels of small commercial spaces prefiguring the life of the nearby souq. 

North of the mechouar, a vast sequence of walled gardens extends toward the Kutubiyya, replacing the former urban block with a continuous system of public spaces. The design alternates between informal planted courtyards and rigorously geometric Islamic gardens, structured by porticoes, water basins, and shaded paths. This green axis reconnects the kasbah to the medina, offering residents and visitors a renewed pedestrian route through a landscape of reflection, leisure, and memory. Concluding before the Kutubiyya’s minaret, the garden becomes both a destination and a promise—a fragment of the unfinished dialogue between the city’s sacred and civic realms.