Crafting Luxury with ‘More-ish’ Qualities …
131
the city developed into a permanent strong-hold. Berbers deserted their itinerant
tents [32] and mud homes. It was Abu Bakr, leader of the Almoravids, who built
the first kasbah (stone house) in Marrakech for the desert Berbers [7, p. 467]. The
first attempt at making it into a sustainable desert-city in Morocco that linked the
ancestral place in the Atlas Mountains was through the instalment of underground
irrigation channels (khettara) [13]. Water could filtrate through a series of rills to the
buildings and surrounding gardens within and outside the medina [13]. Today, what
remains in Marrakech’s medina, a populated area with its relaxed geometric city-grid
(and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site), are masonry buildings punctuated with
luxury boutique riads, or courtyards, and some dotted with reflective pools. Above
and below ground, the network of khettara acts as a figurative and transient ‘Berber
loom’ with its straight warp in stationary tension and moveable liquid weft. ‘Each
object from the past is like a silent word’ [17, p. 385].
In ‘Looking at Mars in Marrakech’, Abdelkader Benali writes:
Marcel could see Marrakech crystal clear from the air. It was a pleasure to look at. It was
only later that he understood that the transparency was deceptive. It was difficult not to
be overwhelmed. The city had proved itself resistant to the tourism hype. It had not only
survived it, but had given it a twist …
She didn’t walk towards him, she floated, as if a gigantic wind turbine blew her along. The
refinement that hid her dark past as if it were a secret weapon had become even more intense.
‘We have seen Mars. He’s been on the red planet’ [6, pp. 65–74].
The above quotation from Benali positions this discussion in tracing the origins
of Marrakech’s museum for the fashion mogul Yves Saint Laurent within the realm
of sustainable luxury and craft (Figs. 2 and 3). I use the term ‘more-ish’ qualities
in this chapter to refer to one’s impulse to create handsome foci (as opposed to the
Moorish, which is culturally based) concerning crafting luxury-layers of history that
have been un-earthed which also provide a new authenticity for the potential for
reuse.
Owing to the physical evidence of meteorites crashing through space towards
Earth, fallen rust-coloured objects from the past are popular for international trade,
especially in Morocco—stones move around by hand on the market. Black-andred meteorites from planet Mars, for example, are found amongst windswept sand
and preserved in Morocco. Curiously, in the early 1980s, a clump of meteorites ‘of
Martian origin represented a breakthrough in attempts to understand the geological
evolution of Mars’ [3, p. 785]. After their arrival on Earth, however, the collected
samples ‘experienced variable degrees of terrestrial weathering’ since they were
‘exposed to organic and other potential contaminants during storage’ [3, p. 785]. In
some ways, these space-junk samples are recyclable in the sense that they formed
new rock types. Left bare and to be re-found, this rock-type might have served as
the lasting foundation rock for the built-up ramparts in Marrakech in the Middle
Ages, made of a distinct pink-and-red chalk-and-clay, earning the city’s reputation
as the ‘red city’. As space-junk [24], the meteorites themselves govern more than the
ramparts through its earthbound permanency. ‘If space-junk is the human debris that
131
the city developed into a permanent strong-hold. Berbers deserted their itinerant
tents [32] and mud homes. It was Abu Bakr, leader of the Almoravids, who built
the first kasbah (stone house) in Marrakech for the desert Berbers [7, p. 467]. The
first attempt at making it into a sustainable desert-city in Morocco that linked the
ancestral place in the Atlas Mountains was through the instalment of underground
irrigation channels (khettara) [13]. Water could filtrate through a series of rills to the
buildings and surrounding gardens within and outside the medina [13]. Today, what
remains in Marrakech’s medina, a populated area with its relaxed geometric city-grid
(and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site), are masonry buildings punctuated with
luxury boutique riads, or courtyards, and some dotted with reflective pools. Above
and below ground, the network of khettara acts as a figurative and transient ‘Berber
loom’ with its straight warp in stationary tension and moveable liquid weft. ‘Each
object from the past is like a silent word’ [17, p. 385].
In ‘Looking at Mars in Marrakech’, Abdelkader Benali writes:
Marcel could see Marrakech crystal clear from the air. It was a pleasure to look at. It was
only later that he understood that the transparency was deceptive. It was difficult not to
be overwhelmed. The city had proved itself resistant to the tourism hype. It had not only
survived it, but had given it a twist …
She didn’t walk towards him, she floated, as if a gigantic wind turbine blew her along. The
refinement that hid her dark past as if it were a secret weapon had become even more intense.
‘We have seen Mars. He’s been on the red planet’ [6, pp. 65–74].
The above quotation from Benali positions this discussion in tracing the origins
of Marrakech’s museum for the fashion mogul Yves Saint Laurent within the realm
of sustainable luxury and craft (Figs. 2 and 3). I use the term ‘more-ish’ qualities
in this chapter to refer to one’s impulse to create handsome foci (as opposed to the
Moorish, which is culturally based) concerning crafting luxury-layers of history that
have been un-earthed which also provide a new authenticity for the potential for
reuse.
Owing to the physical evidence of meteorites crashing through space towards
Earth, fallen rust-coloured objects from the past are popular for international trade,
especially in Morocco—stones move around by hand on the market. Black-andred meteorites from planet Mars, for example, are found amongst windswept sand
and preserved in Morocco. Curiously, in the early 1980s, a clump of meteorites ‘of
Martian origin represented a breakthrough in attempts to understand the geological
evolution of Mars’ [3, p. 785]. After their arrival on Earth, however, the collected
samples ‘experienced variable degrees of terrestrial weathering’ since they were
‘exposed to organic and other potential contaminants during storage’ [3, p. 785]. In
some ways, these space-junk samples are recyclable in the sense that they formed
new rock types. Left bare and to be re-found, this rock-type might have served as
the lasting foundation rock for the built-up ramparts in Marrakech in the Middle
Ages, made of a distinct pink-and-red chalk-and-clay, earning the city’s reputation
as the ‘red city’. As space-junk [24], the meteorites themselves govern more than the
ramparts through its earthbound permanency. ‘If space-junk is the human debris that