The earthquake came at 23:11, when most families in the villages were at home. It had a magnitude of up to 6.9, the strongest ever recorded by instruments in Morocco. Its epicentre lay in Ighil, about 70 kilometres southwest of Marrakech. Official figures count 2,960 dead and more than 22,000 buildings destroyed outright. Morocco had not lost so many people to an earthquake since Agadir in 1960.
Much of what fell was built from earth and stone. After a disaster like that, it would have been easy to decide the old methods had failed and pour concrete in their place. Naji argues the opposite. For nearly 25 years she has worked in the High Atlas and southern Morocco to bring back stone and rammed-earth (pisé) construction. Her approach is to keep the ancestral technique and add the modern anti-seismic reinforcement it was missing.
Naji studied architecture in Paris, earned a doctorate in anthropology and opened her practice in Morocco in 2004. Since 2008 she has been based in Tiznit. Her training in both fields shows in the work. For the Ministry of the Interior she restored two collective granaries, the igoudar, in Amtoudi, and rehabilitated the Ksar of Assa. On each site she trained local masons and unskilled workers, so that the skills stayed in the community after she left. That work put her on the shortlist for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
Since the quake she has helped rebuild several villages and a school in the Marrakech region. In her view, a house built in the old way, by people who know the old way, keeps a village's memory alive. The knowledge lives in the hands of the people who build, and it is lost if they stop.
The wider reconstruction is large and still unfinished. The government set aside 120 billion dirhams for a five-year programme and offered 140,000 dirhams to each household whose home had collapsed completely. Most of the tens of thousands of houses rebuilt so far were put up quickly, as they had to be. Naji's sites move at the pace of packed earth.
This month, in Paris, the Institut du Monde Arabe awarded her the Grand Prix of its Design Awards for the Tiznit Heritage Interpretation Centre. She built it entirely of rammed earth, inside the town's ramparts from 1810, with wood, stone and tataoui, a traditional ceiling of woven reeds and branches. The prize was given in a Paris institution. The work it honours is being done on sites like the one in the Ourika Valley, where families who lost their homes are being rehoused in the old way, with walls built to withstand the next earthquake.
It is not just rebuilding, but also preserving a social fabric and collective knowledge.