Studio Sahn
SampleCourtyard logic for buildings that have to breathe.
Capabilities
- Residential and small institutional architecture
- Passive cooling and courtyard planning
- Adaptive reuse of riad and medina structures
- Material sourcing — tadelakt, zellige, local stone
Studio Sahn is a Casablanca architecture practice built around a single recurring idea: the courtyard as a working piece of climate equipment, not a decorative void. Founded by two architects trained in Rabat and Lyon, the studio takes on houses, small institutions, and medina rehabilitation work, turning down projects that ask for a courtyard as ornament rather than as plan.
Practice
Every commission starts with a section drawing before a plan — how air moves through the building matters more, at this stage, than how the rooms are arranged. Recessed courts, stack ventilation, and shaded circulation routes do the cooling work a compressor would otherwise have to do, drawn from vernacular Moroccan courtyard houses rather than imported passive-house templates. Material choices follow the same logic: tadelakt, zellige, and local stone sourced within a day's drive, not specified from a catalog.
Commissions
Recent work includes a private house in Casablanca's Anfa district organized entirely around a passive-cooled courtyard, the rehabilitation of a collapsing riad in the old medina into a small guesthouse, and a neighborhood library built around a single skylit reading court. The studio keeps a small roster of active projects at any time, favoring depth of climate detailing over volume of commissions.
