Casablanca Twin Center

The Casablanca Twin Center is the most recognisable modern landmark of Morocco's largest city, a pair of matching towers that rise above the busy Maârif district. Completed at the end of the 1990s to designs associated with the architect Ricardo Bofill, the twenty-eight-storey towers reach around a hundred and fifteen metres and long ranked among the tallest buildings in the country.

The complex mixes commerce and daily city life. The towers house offices and a hotel, while their base contains a shopping centre and cafes, making the site a hub of contemporary Casablanca rather than a historic monument. Their crisp, geometric silhouette, echoing traditional forms in a modern idiom, has become a symbol of the city's role as Morocco's economic capital.

As a piece of skyline, the towers are hard to miss. Visible from many parts of central Casablanca, they serve as a useful orientation point and mark the junction of major boulevards. Around them spreads the Maârif, one of the liveliest shopping and dining districts in the city, full of boutiques, restaurants and street life.

For visitors, the Twin Center offers a taste of the modern metropolis that complements the city's Art Deco heritage and the vast Hassan II Mosque on the coast. It works well as a stop while exploring downtown, whether to shop, to eat, or simply to admire the contrast between contemporary Casablanca and the older Morocco found elsewhere. The mall is open through the day and into the evening, and the surrounding streets are at their most animated after dark. There is no observation deck open to the general public, so the towers are best appreciated from the streets and cafes below. As the clearest architectural expression of Casablanca's ambitions as a business capital, the Twin Center rounds out any picture of the city.