BCP TOWER
Atelier Rachid Andaloussi, Groupe3 Architectes
ARCHITECTS
Atelier Rachid Andaloussi, Groupe3 Architectes
MANUFACTURERS
Kuraray, Saint-Gobain, Metra Building , Schäfer
DESIGN TEAM
Groupe3 Architectes
PHOTOGRAPHS
Doublespace Photography
AREA
24000 m²
YEAR
2024
LOCATION
Anfa, Morocco
CATEGORY
Offices, Office Buildings
English description provided by the architects.
At the heart of Casablanca Metropolis, the forthcoming Financial City presents itself as a tool for regional influence and a laboratory of architectural renewal.
In this ambitious context, we envisioned the project for the new headquarters of BCP Bank to embody both modernity, as a Casablanca tradition, and projection into the twenty-first century, while expressing an institutional image, in service of the bank's mission and values: solidarity, proximity, citizenship, and performance.
These values suggest an approach that goes against the usual competition of forms and symbols that characterizes tower districts, favoring timelessness over fleeting trends.
This uniqueness, marked by serenity and sobriety, nevertheless finds expression in an iconic silhouette that combines grace and solidity, transparency and opacity, lightness and inertia.
The project rises as a totemic and monolithic figure, almost telluric, draped in whiteness as a tribute to the city of Casablanca.
The project's design takes shape in the public space of Anfa Place, of which it is the natural extension through a hall-plaza located between the exterior and interior, emphasizing the desire for a prestigious and welcoming institutional and popular address.
This plaza serves as a symbolic threshold, where public space and the institution merge to affirm the identity of a bank in service to the community.
Emerging from a podium of 4 levels, which organizes all shared functions and ensures a pedestrian scale, the tower stretches its refined silhouette over 19 levels of standard floors and 2 levels dedicated to governance functions.
Perpendicularly positioned to the former airport runway, the project develops its floors on either side of a central axis, addressing its longer facade to the north and south, the most favorable orientations for workspaces.
Controlling light for comfort and optimizing energy has been a determining factor in the building's morphology, allowing us to strongly characterize the facades according to different orientations.
Thus, the fully glazed north facade facing the sea horizon is an abstract system of a thin double-skin enriched with kinetic motorized sunshades, expressing the future, transparency, and foresight.
The south facade, doubled with a white concrete moucharabieh, creates a deep texture whose pattern expands with height, accentuating the elevation and dematerialization of the tower.
Like a relief that captures light at different times of the day, the facade facing the south side of the city expresses comfort, ecology, and virtuous progress.
The east and west facades, narrow and opaque, are covered with white fiber-reinforced concrete panels and delimit the north and south facades.
Contrasting with their opacity and mineral quality, they express stability, sustainability, and by extension, traditions, roots, and origins.
The landscape is present in all layers of the project, mainly contained in two large suspended gardens—one for the outdoor terrace of the company restaurant located in the podium and the other in the vegetal patio situated on the upper floors of the tower and enclosed behind the moucharabieh.
