The Almohads: cities connected through architecture
From the Kutubiyya to Hassan Tower, monuments offer a route through an influential period. Follow cities and projects, noticing that surviving evidence includes completed buildings and others marked by their unfinished state.
A photograph of a place surviving today, not a reconstruction of the period.
A monument within a sequence
The Metropolitan Museum links Almohad examples in Marrakesh and Rabat, including the Kutubiyya and Hassan Tower. Together they place architecture within a political and cultural world larger than one city.
At Rabat, the unfinished mosque project changes the meaning of open space and columns. At Marrakesh, the minbar retains a connection with the earlier Almoravid period. Each monument follows its own path within a broad period label.
Rather than turn similarity into sameness, compare mass, façade divisions and appearance on the skyline. This is a visual entrance supported by historical sources, not a substitute for them.
Continue to Marinid Fez and its colleges. The scale of looking shifts from towers seen at a distance to courtyard and wall details, while craft remains a thread joining large buildings to small pieces.
Story sources: The Metropolitan Museum of Art · UNESCOStory sources
Sources reviewed:
- The Maghrib, 1000–1400The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- The Minbar from the Kutubiyya MosqueThe Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Rabat, modern capital and historic cityUNESCO
