(“Text as submitted by Architect”)
Tarik Zoubdi
“Tarik Zoubdi graduated from the National School of Architecture in Rabat in 2006. He founded TZA workshop In 2008, and has been awarded several times in Morocco and abroad. Specially the jury and public prize in “Architizer A + Award 2018”, and the “Arab Architects Awards 2018” in Beirut. Moreover “Middle East Architects Award” in Dubai, as well as the “Golden A’ design Award” in Italy. His projet “ Wall of Knowledge “ Was longlisted for “Aga Khan Architecture Award 2019”. he also joined the technical reviewer’s team for “Abdullatif Al Fozan Award for Mosque Architecture” in 2019″.
Practice Ideology
In my opinion, architecture is the poetic spatial translation of human aspirations for a better life. I believe in contextual architecture, which claims to belong to a place, as if it has always been part of it. I believe that we must resist to the collective temptation to fall into “folk mimicry”, and renounce to any temptation to “fashion” by seeking timelessness.
Various things can influence my work. I love the drama emanating from the ruins, these standing witnesses of the collective memory, which time has been able to root in space. I like the grass that grows in the roadway; nature that takes back its right on the action of man. I love words and I love writing on walls, just like the children who can’t stop scribbling on the classroom tables, or the first men who started drawing on the walls of the caves. I like the place of chance in design, the accidental beauty, the unexpected…
I hate overly talkative buildings and the “deafening visual noise” that characterizes big cities. “The absence of clutter provides space to think, and probably even to understand.
I have been interested in the work of many architects, but all roads lead me back to “first loves”; Louis KAHN, Oscar NIEMEYER, Luis BARRAGAN, or more recently Peter ZUMTHOR, Rafael MONEO, and Mario botta.
I hate the architecture of false pretences. I am always looking for a kind of truth in the materiality of my projects. Yes, unfortunately even materials can lie (fake wood, fake stone, fake marble…). I also think that we should promote the resistant materials to escape the ” planned obsolescence ” of buildings, which become more fragile and ephemeral. I like simple geometrical shapes who became richer joined together; with some friends we call it simplixity, a kind of complex simplicity…
