The vision
To acquire and restore a dwelling in the medina of Fez, to establish a residential school and to pay the masters to teach their craft to those who live on the spot.
A craft of the hand is transmitted through presence. It is learned by living beside the one who possesses its mastery, by imitation first and by correction afterwards, for a time that nothing shortens. Where this daily presence ceases to be possible, the knowledge does not take refuge in books, and the most exact descriptions have never put a hand back in a condition to make.
That is why short internships, exhibitions and technical surveys, useful as they are, do not suffice on their own. They keep the memory of a gesture without reconstituting the conditions in which it is transmitted, which suppose a master available, a workshop open every day, and someone who stays long enough for his hand to become sure.
What is proposed
The project consists in acquiring an old dwelling in the medina of Fez, having it restored by firms of the city according to the rules of the art, and instituting a house where young men live, pray, work and learn a craft from masters paid to teach as much as to produce.
The order of the works has been settled. Specialised firms restore the dwelling and the residents do not intervene on the monument, for two converging reasons: a delicate restoration site cannot be treated as a trial for beginners, and the house cannot lodge anyone while it is under works. The first group of pupils is therefore formed, in that time, with the masters of the medina, each sleeping among his own, and enters the house already half formed.
The firms are of Fez, and this condition is not negotiable. A dwelling of the medina restored by firms come from elsewhere would be a scenic fiction, however perfectly executed, and the house would have no relation with the city on the day it opened its doors.
Why now
This retreat reaches well beyond the Maghreb: wherever a knowledge was transmitted from master to disciple, the chain breaks faster than it is rebuilt. A maalem who dies without a successor takes with him not only a gesture, but a way of seeing, of measuring and of waiting, which no book replaces.
In Fez the corporations still keep their names, their quarters and their institutions, and an apprentice finds within walking distance the workshops of several crafts. This density thins from generation to generation, and it is this that fixes the calendar of the project far more than the circumstances of those who carry it.
The state of the project
The house does not yet exist. What exists is a written programme, an internal rule drafted, a settled doctrine of the building site, and the search for the dwelling itself.
The community will receive adult men, freely committed to this form of life, for a duration counted in years.
What the house will not become
The market of guesthouses in the medina is saturated, and a dwelling restored without a destination becomes a commercial building within some ten years.
The provision that prevents this here is patrimonial rather than moral. The property is destined to be withdrawn from commerce, in the form that Moroccan law will allow, so that the destination of the house ceases to depend on the intentions of whoever holds it, today as in fifty years.
Transmission
The crafts that disappear. The masters who transmit. The young men who receive and, one day, will teach.
Character
Hand, gaze, character, presence to others. One forms a man, and not only an artisan.
Continuity
From the house to the family, from the family to the house, the chain is not broken. The khitbah, during the years of craft, is already turned toward that hearth.
Openness and collaborations
A house that learns does not close upon itself: open to schools, to workshops, to institutions.
Back to the project
The words of this page are in the common glossary; the works cited in the sources; the sister house is Al-Funduq aṣ-Ṣiqillī.