In their ‘Flying Market’ concept for the sustainable market square proposal in Casablanca, which won the third prize, the architects began with a simple exercise, utilizing associative words, gathering inspirations and ideas to define the project and its aim. Designed by Florent Chagny, Soufia Louzir, Thomas Sponti, and Florian Chazeau, they decided to propose a ‘magic’ cover, a transformative cap to the utilitarian every-day market. The design, a structural network, levitates over the market utilizing a suspension system of twenty-three colorful Helium balloons. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Plenty of images come directly to the mind: colors, smells, people, twilight, getting lost, magical atmospheres, and flying carpets. The first step was to design a pattern inspired by the Moroccan flag’s star, multiplied to create a “Moucharabieh” design, it is the genesis of all of the market’s elements. Visible on the polished grey concrete floor and materialized in the stainless steel joints, it is the drawings’ source of programmatic organization.
