This talk analyzes the contested meanings of the Franco-Musulman Hospital (1935) in Bobigny, France, arguing that it was a potent affective space of World War I’s legacy of trauma. An Orientalist structure designed by two French academic architects and with a façade modeled after the Bab Mansour in Meknes, the hospital was intended to serve a growing population of African and Muslim workers in the Paris region. It sought to solve the dilemma of social mixing in dispensaries and hospitals in the Paris region, an issue dating from World War I. The sponsoring agency, La Société des Affaires Indigenes et Nord-Africains (SAINA), was a surveillance-assistance agency established in 1925 and run by the Parisian police in order to regulate colonial workers’ presence in the city. A decade later in 1935, the Franco-Musulman Hospital opened to much fanfare. On the opening day of celebrations, the building was decorated with the military flags of colonial regiments, deploying a residual wartime discourse of fraternity in the service of greater France. Illustrated magazines covered the event and photography helped promote the hospital as a sign of colonial paternalism. Elite Algerians such as Abdelkader Ben Ghabrit, an Algerian lawyer as well as founder and director of the Great Mosque of Paris, advocated for it as an important medical service, while Algerian nationalist Messali Hadj saw it as perpetuating religious and racial segregation. Less visible to the camera eye but still subject to surveillance were the practices of care. North African medical personnel, including a Dr. Ali Sakka, served immigrant patients during the interwar era, providing a model of care in a context of fear and hate. The hospital’s first year of about 1700 medical records suggests that an estimated one-quarter of the patients could have been veterans, making it a significant space of memory and forgetting about the war. While drawing upon studies of Orientalist architecture, art and photography, this paper extends those aesthetic and post-colonial analyses to borrow from the poetics of space, new studies of affect and the psychiatry of architecture. I argue that the visual evidence of the hospital’s architectural space should be read alongside less visible traces of the hospital’s affective life. Such an interpretation can expand our understanding of interwar emotions and complicate the image of the colonial worker and veteran.