Rehabilitation and monitoring of the Lincoln Hotel in Casablanca
The long-awaited renovation of the 5* heritage hotel
A jewel of the Neo-Moorish Art Deco architecture, the Lincoln Hotel built in 1916 features a façade that is listed as part of Morocco’s historical heritage. Abandoned for decades, decision was finally taken to renovate and to reopen it in 2025 under the Radisson Collection banner.
Complex works and a global solution by Soletanche-Freyssinet
The technical challenge of this project is the demolition of the old structure of the hotel, while preserving its listed façade, very unstable, which will form part of the new hotel design.
Local subsidiaries of Soletanche Freyssinet Freyssima with stps maroc, Solsif Maroc (Soletanche-Bachy Morocco) and Sixense worked together to provide a global solution.
From January 2021, Freyssima supervised the demolition of the ruins and the initial works to secure the façade, while Solsif Maroc was called out to manage the ground works and the wall shoring for two basement levels for the future hotel. Both companies relied on Sixense to make sure that all operations were running well, thanks to the installation of a monitoring system on the façade and nearby buildings.
Real time monitoring to control the works impact
As part of these works, Sixense Maroc was called to install a robotized theodolite Cyclops to continuously monitor the listed façades as well as the nearby tramway tracks.
For 24 months, Sixense Maroc has been controlling the stability of the monument building and its environment by moving the automatic topography monitoring system to follow the progress of works.
During the foundation improvement works by Solsif Maroc by nailing and ground anchors installation, the Sixense teams added a real time vibration monitoring system as well as load cells on the anchors.
New works phase: the construction of the new hotel
In January 2023, the structural works start with a new general contractor and Freyssima gets back to work with a new 6-month contract awarded by REALITES AFRIQUE for the posttensioning of 13 606 m² slabs for the future Hotel.
The project stakeholders asked again Sixense Maroc to install a monitoring system with new automatic sensors (8 biaxial tiltmeter and 4 crackmeters) following the requirements of the construction works of the superstructure and moved the Cyclops and the geophone 3D. The structural sensors will be maintained until the end of the structural works.
All data collected since January 2021 were managed by our Geoscope platform (storage, visualization and automatic alarms). The latter was recently replaced by our new generation Beyond Monitoring platform, without interruption or loss of information.
The monitoring system installed by Sixense with the real time data management and visualization platform allows the construction companies to follow the impacts of the sensitive works in an easy and secure way, allowing a better understanding of the phenomena during complex works.
