Contemporary context is marked by the globalization of cultural transfers on the one hand, and the resurgence of expressions of local collective identity on the other (Broudehoux, 2001). This resurgence is particularly visible in architecture and urbanism, as they play a significant role in shaping cultural identity. Moroccan architecture is one of the visible expressions of this process of identification. The present paper aims to analyze the ways and processes through which Moroccan architectural identity is constructed and presented outside the country, taking universal exhibitions as a case study. For instance, we will try to understand how architects construct and present Morocco in universal exhibitions pavilions: Do they use specific traditional design elements\methods with temporal and spatial references? How? We initially worked with the three selection stages of architectural design elements in order to construct national identity, as developed by Popescu (2005). The case studies, used to verify these stages, were grouped into three chronological periods: pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial. Following these identification/selection stages, we have been able to associate the pre-colonial and colonial pavilions with the first stage and the postcolonial pavilion with the second and third stages, which occur simultaneously. The boundary between the second and third stages is not clear and precise but rather ambivalent. The ambivalence of the Moroccan context leads us to formulate another stage, which consists of a ‘revisit’ ‘traditional’ architecture. We use the ‘revisit’ in the sense of a rereading and a continuous and dynamic reinterpretation. © 2019 The Authors. Published by IEREK press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ).