Riad Kherdeen to present “Ecological Aesthetics and the Spectacle of Brutalism in the Aftershock of Morocco’s Agadir Earthquake” at the Society of Architectural Historians’s 79th Annual International Conference in Mexico City on April 17, 2026
Introduction
Assistant Professor Riad Kherdeen will be giving a paper titled "Ecological Aesthetics and the Spectacle of Brutalism in the Aftershock of Morocco's Agadir Earthquake" at the Society of Architectural Historians's 79th Annual International Conference in Mexico City on April 17, 2026. He is on a panel called "Repairing/Demolishing: An Environmental History of Brutalism."
Paper abstract:
As the Moroccan contemporary artist Yto Barrada asked in her 2018 Barbican Center exhibition exploring the ghosts of 1960 Agadir earthquake, “How does one conceive reconstruction after a disaster?” At the time of Agadir’s reconstruction, Brasilia was being constructed and Chandigarh was nearly fully constructed. Both Brazil and India were once colonized, like Morocco, and their embrace of functionalist urbanism and an architecture of raw reinforced-concrete was just as much a political decision as it was an aesthetic one, just like in Morocco. If brutalism came about in Europe in response to the devastation wrought by the Second World War, as a reflection of the aesthetics of destruction, and in India and Brazil as a future-oriented embrace of the utopic promises of high-modernism, then in Agadir, both of these founts of brutalism come together at the intersection of an ecological event that accelerated decolonization efforts. And yet, many critics of the Agadir reconstruction questioned the spectacle of high-modernist monumental architecture and asked: For whom was the new city intended for? This paper argues that brutalism in Agadir, while embraced as part of various future-oriented, nation-building strategies, was charged with traumas of the past caused by colonialism, war, and nature-induced disasters. What happens when we think of brutalism alongside ecological phenomenon like earthquakes? And how do we account for the runoff and other destructive ecological impacts of concrete production in local communities? This paper will focus on some of the top-down politics and aesthetics of the reconstruction of Agadir as part of Morocco’s history of decolonization while also tracking some of the critiques of this nation-building project from below in form of a avant-garde short film titled Retour á Agadir (Return to Agadir) by Mohammed Afifi.