Working from a shared office in Casablanca, Saad El Kabbaj, Driss Kettani, and Mohamed Amine Siana have developed a distinct approach to practice that has served the young architects well. They each take on smaller independent projects, mainly high-end residences, but come together for large commissions, which have included several university buildings in the south of Morocco, a result of competitions they won not long after finishing architecture school, where they were classmates.

A more recent competition win led to their first K–12 project, the Jacques Chirac school in Rabat. While those earlier university buildings were spread out across large campuses and drew from the vernacular tradition of their region, this new private school sits on a prominent boulevard, and refers to the postcolonial architecture of the capital city. “Rabat has a beautiful modern heritage,” says Siana, a 2016 Record Design Vanguard, about the work of a generation of French and Moroccan architects who came of age in the 1960s. “They created simple, elegant buildings with sober volumes. That is what we wanted to do here.”