Rami Abou-Khalil
260049755
Final Thesis Description
We
Can
Go
East,
But
Not
Too
Far.
A New Ruin, And Its Festival, for Beirut
On the architectural abuse of Panopticism, the reuse of modernism, the disintegration of hysterical objects and the integration of a festival in Beirut.
Burj
The site of the intervention is a tower named Burj el-Murr. It was built in 1974 and owned by members of the
el-Murr family, a prominent political clan. The tower was left unfinished when the war halted construction, and
despite many dermatological renovations and designs has never been more than a concrete artifact. Originally
meant to be an office tower, it was only ever used as a sniper outpost, becoming a major actor in one of the most
horrific chapters of the civil war. 36 stories of office space were meant to rise from a two story slab of clubs,
retail and a cinema, as welll as underground parking (Naamani). The tower was structurally ambitious, relying
on a hollow-tube concrete structure, where all the facades are load bearing and are braced in the long direction
by shear walls that enclose the core of the building.
The tower always seemed to gravitate towards its present state of finished incompleteness. This project decides to further prolong this finished/incomplete state by grafting itself into the tower in a way that maintains its
proportions, does not require the addition of prominent auxiliary buildings, or even the addition of windows or
glazing, which would compromise the ruined quality of the tower, and by creating a program that will further
sustain and celebrate this ruin quality. The structural organization of the building, in three parts, is used to organize the procession and to rationalize the transformations to the building.
Archival Images from 1974, showing guerilla fighters in the tower, and war damages
Panopticism
Architecture in Beirut hasn’t yet normalized the terrors created by panopticism. The overwhelming collective
amnesia that has characterized the post-war era in Lebanon is transcended by one fear: Acrophobia. Almost all
of the towers that became iconic of a Foucaldian sniper war (Burj-el Murr being a prominent figure, but also
the Holiday Inn tower, Burj Rizk…) have resisted reconstruction, and are still empty shells. In “Yalo”; Elias
Khoury’s postwar novel about a young Guerilla fighter, Yalo is unable to let go of panoptic power. He reenacts
his sniper days by surprising visitors in the woods with a flashlight.
Burj el-Murr is probably the most notorious of the sniper towers, and was a crucial player in the most horrific
parts of the civil war. It is crucial to reconcile Beirut’s architecture with panopticism, and transform it into a
positive creator of public consciousness towards the city. The project does this by transforming the building into
a ‘Beirutorama’ of sorts, merging the civic experience of theaters and concerts with the almost military experience of observing the city.
Cranes, Balloons, and Ruins:
In order to adequately resolve and respond to this seemingly generalized acrophobia, The program takes root in
two events: The first is the story of the Beirut hot air balloon, and the second is crowd behavior during the Beirut Spring. Far from being precedents in the traditional architectural sense, these events inform the problematic
of panopticism in Beirut.
Hashim Sarkis’ Hot Air Balloon was a strategic proposal to democratize panopticism and reconcile the Lebanese psyche with verticality, but it is precisely this democratization of panoptic gaze that rendered it vulnerable.
A few weeks before the Hariri assassination, a yellow hot air balloon was set up, a stone’s throw away from
the tower., that gave the Lebanese a rare opportunity at getting a bird’s eye view of their capital. The balloon’s
launch pad was designed by Hashim Sarkis, the Aga Khan professor of architecture at the Harvard GSD. When
the Hariri Assassination happened, the balloon was automatically moved to a location far from the blast site,
and in the tense security climate that ensued, the balloon had to stop functioning. Its panoptic properties meant
it was too problematic, since it was offering the Lebanese to be prime witnesses of major political events for the
mere fee of ten dollars.
Another consequence of the Hariri assassination is the Beirut spring. The only image that managed to capture
the scale of that event was taken by an adventurous photographer from a crane. The image captured the spirit
of the Protest, but also pointed out the lack of accessible lookout points from which to observe it: no one had
experienced the revolution from above.
Since one of the goals of the thesis is to maintain the iconic, ruin-like quality of the tower, another study that
has informed the program was the analysis of the link between festivals and ruins, and of their cultural, political
and spatial contexts.
As a result of those investigations, the program consists of a plaza, a garden, a philharmonic concert hall, an
extension to the Conservatoire providing extra rehearsal spaces, that form the base of the tower, and connect it
to the city. Within the tower, which would mainly operate in the summer in the context of a ‘festival’ is a series
of VIP lounges, a Restaurant bar with a terrace, and an outdoors performance space.
Fantastic Technology and the Skyscraper
In Delirious New York, Koolhaas theorizes the corbusian skyscraper, from which Burj el Murr traces its lineage, as a ‘naked’ building, but Le Corbusier’s ‘honest’ skyscraper comes at the very high cost of total banality.
This project attempts to return the modernist skyscraper to its pre-Corbusian state: Infinite fields of possibilities, architectural lobotomy, etc. Technology itself is not fantastic. It has to be used as ‘an instrument and extension of the imagination’. While being fiercely anticorbusian as an idea, it is to be one of the crucial components
of this project; not the myth of technology, but technology at the service of Myth.
After being welcomed by the ground floor lobby, above which hover private VIP lounges, and the going through
the dark, tall, piranesian core of the building, visitors have to take elevators up to the 35th floor bar, and/or their
seats. In this part of the building, the dense stacking of floor plates has disappeared, and made way for four glass
elevators that allow them to experience the inside of the building in a radically different way. First, they are
different from the elevators originally planned in this, and many other, office buildings in that it is not tucked
deep inside the building, but pushed against its edges. The hope is that the generated experience is also radically
different from ‘atrium’ elevators, since the void references only itself.
The second potent way in which technology is used to generate architectural mythology is the technological
processing of the outdoor concert/theater experience. In an inversion of the traditional sequence of the unveiling
of the performance, it is the stage that permanently cantilevered off the ‘neck’ of the tower (this is a ‘headless’
tower), exposed to the city, but hidden from the public. The public, in turn, inhabits a 12-storey high mobile section of the building-nicknamed The Mobile- that comprises the seating areas framed by two lobbies (connected
to the static lobby), and two bars (connecting to the terrace and restaurant/bar). In the ‘closed’ position, the
lobby connects to the top of the Mobile, and the bar and restaurant errace spills into it. When the show is about
to begins, the audience gathers in the bar, lobby or take their seat in the mobile, which then proceeds to rise and
leave the neck of the building, vertiginously elevating the audience above the stage and the city. In this case, a
simple lift bridge pulley/counterweight system is used to propel the audience into the air, and directly confronts
the ‘acrophobia’ that this thesis diagnoses and addresses. The audience transgresses the ‘sniper’ experience they
have been put in while they were inside the building’s protective concrete shell, and become completely vulnerable to the city’s gaze.
Archeology:
Solidere’s Motto for Beirut was ‘The Ancient City of the Future’. After Solidere’s early Masterplan, a utopian/
hypermodernist tabula rasa scheme, was met with scepticism from developers and tourists alike, Solidere turned
to historical legitimization as a way to create a backdrop to redevelopment. Beirut was not going to be built,
it was going to be rebuilt, hystericaly and historically restored to an impeccable state of detailing. Monuments
were selected from a plethora of deemed archeological sites from different eras, to be preserved and rebuilt.
One crucial era was forgotten in this renovation frenzy; and that is modernism, specially the kind of pure laine
modernist fragments of the city, such as Burj-el-Murr.
Far from embracing the archeological monumentalization of the city’s remaining landmarks, this project will
question the nature of the archeologically charged object by playing with the extent to which this landmark is
transformed. Turning the tower into a ruin, and programming it as such is an ironic and slightly tongue-in-cheek
scenario, as buildings of the modernist lineage are on their death bed in Solidere. The strategic destruction of
parts of the building (radical in the new ‘hall of elevators’, partial in the vip lounge areas, the preservation of
main structural components of the buildings, mainly the façade and shear walls) might hint at solidere’s aggressive modus operandi, but is in fact used to ‘preserve’ the building’s iconic shell.
Novel & Myth
Lebanese artists and architects have only conservatively embraced the war as subject matter. References to the
war often appear in the plastic arts in a literal and direct way, e.g. material for sculpture such as shrapnel and
barbed wire… Postwar filmmakers and photographers also seem to have tried to crystallize the war with images,
and, if we exclude a few remarkable artists such as Akram Zaatari or Walid Raad, most of them treat the war
with the same kind of dermatological obsession with the photogeneity of the destructed surface of the city and
of the body. Architects are just as susceptible of this superficiality, and have not yet reminded the Lebanese that
this war, eternalized in images, happened on their streets.
Out of this postwar amnesia and superficiality, I would argue that two actors emerge and resist the comfort of
this vacuum. On the one hand is the failure of the Lebanese economy to jumpstart reconstruction. The downtown core, left hysterically empty by overambitious market speculation and unadventurous developers, does
stand as a reminder of the ‘scares and scars’ of the war.
On the other hand are a handful of authors who have integrated the war in their novels and have managed to
address its traumas, absurdities and spaces in a poignant but democratic way. Authors such as Rashid el-Daif,
Hoda Barakat, Hassan Daoud or Elias Khoury have given the novel ‘new forms and imbued it with unusual
traits in order for it to be able to capture the unusual historic and spatial attributes of a city at war with itself’
(Sarkis, 2001). The postwar novel managed to successfully narrate the war by framing it within the myth of
Beirut’s cyclical destruction.
Novels have already done what memorials and Architecture were expected to do. As a result, Beirut does not
need memorials. Now, Architecture needs to go beyond the memorial and needs to internalize the traumas of
wars not by absolving its people of the burden of remembrance but by integrating the war’s magical/hyper realism into its syntax. We need to start looking at patterns of difference in the way that the Lebanese have inhabited the city during war as a way to propose a revolutionary architecture that addresses its mythology.
Bibliography
Al-Kassim, Dina; Crisis of the unseen: Unearthing the Political Aesthetics of Hysteria in the Archeology and the
Arts of the New Beirut, in Parachute 108, Montreal, 2002
Arthenius, Thordis Restoration in the Machine Age: Themes of Conservation in Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin. AA
Files. No. 38, Spring 1999, p10-22.
Asfour, K. The Reconstruction of Beirut: A Dialogue Across Borders Mimar. Vol. 11, No. 3(40), September 1991, 18-19.
Barakat, Hoda, The Tiller of Waters, AUC Press; New Ed edition (2004)
Barre, F., et al. La Reconstruction de Beyrouth. In Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 191, June 1977
Basilico, G., et al. Beyrouth Centre Ville. in Domus. No. 748, April 1993
Chakar, Tony, My Non-Presence is Not a Coincidence…To the Ends of the Earth, in Volume, Volume 10, Archis#4 2006
Chakar, Tony: Living in an Idea; in Parachute 108, Montreal, 2002
Chakar, Tony; Two worlds, An Automaton and a Skyscraper: A True Strory, Bidoun, Arts nd Culture from the
Middle East 05, Fall 2005
Charlesworth, Esther; Beirut, City as Hearth? In At War with the City, edited by Paola Somma, Urban International Press, 2004.
Davidson, Cynthia; “Scenes from a Less Delirious New York”, in Log2, spring 2004
Deeb, Lara; An Enchanted Modern, Gender and Public Piety in Shi’I Lebanon; Princeton University Press, 2006
Doxiadis, Constantinos, Building Entopia, Athens Publishing Center, 1975
Easterling, Keller, The Zone, in Visionary Power, Producing the Contemporary City, Catalogue of the 2007 Rotterdam Architecture Biennale, NAi Publishers, 2007
El-Dahdah, Fares, On Solidere’s Motto, “Beirut, Ancient City of the Future”, in “Projecting Beirut, episodes
in the Construction and Reconstruction of a Modern City”, edited by Rowe, Peter and Sarkis, Hashim, Prestel,
Munich, London, New York, 1997
El-Khoury, Rodolphe, Beirut Subkime, , in “Projecting Beirut, episodes in the Construction and Reconstruction
of a Modern City”, edited by Rowe, Peter and Sarkis, Hashim, Prestel, Munich, London, New York, 1997
Faour, Muhammad, The Silent Revolution in Lebanon: Changing Values of the Youth.American University of
Beirut , 1998
Gavin, Angus. Beirut Reborn: The Restoration and Development of the Central District. London: Academy Editions, 1996.
Ghorayeb Marlene; The Work and Influence of Michel Ecochard in Lebanon, in “Projecting Beirut, episodes
in the Construction and Reconstruction of a Modern City”, edited by Rowe, Peter and Sarkis, Hashim, Prestel,
Munich, London, New York, 1997
Hage, Ghassan; Migration, Marginalized Masculinity and Dephallicization: A Lebanese Villager’s Experience,
in “Sexuality in the Arab World”, edited by Khalaf, Samir and Gagnon, John, SAQI books, London, San Francisco, Beirut, 2006
Hassan Daoud, Mathilde’s House, New York Review of Books (June 2002)
Jarrar, Maher; Sexuality, Fantasy and Violence in Lebanon’s Postwar Novel, , in “Sexuality in the Arab World”,
edited by Khalaf, Samir and Gagnon, John, SAQI books, London, San Francisco, Beirut, 2006
Kassir, Samir (Posthumous) and Fisk, Robert, Being Arab, translated by Will Hobson, Verso 2006
Khalaf, S. and Khoury, P.S., eds. Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and Post-War Reconstruction.
Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993.
Khalaf, Samir; “The Spaces of War in Lebanon”, in “Cultural Resistance; Global and Local Encounters in The
Middle East”, Saqi, London, 2001
Khalaf, Samir; Social Structure and Urban Planning in Lebanon; in “Cultural Resistance; Global and Local
Encounters in The Middle East”, Saqi, London, 2001.
Khbeiz, Bilal; Beirut’s Costly Modernity, in Parachute108, Montreal, 2002
Khoury, Bernard, Centrale, in Log2, Spring 2004
Koolhaas, Rem; “Delirious New York”, 1994
Merabet, Sofian; Creating Queer Space in Beirut, in “Sexuality in the Arab World”, edited by Khalaf, Samir and
Miessen, Markus, Interview with Rem Koolhaas, A Refusal of Obligatory Extravagances, p.41, Bidoun, Arts
and Culture from the Middle East, issue 08, Fall 2006.
Rabbat, Nasser; The Interplay of History and Archeology in Beirut, in “Projecting Beirut, episodes in the Construction and Reconstruction of a Modern City”, edited by Rowe, Peter and Sarkis, Hashim, Prestel, Munich,
London, New York
Rogers, Sarah; Forging History, Performing Memory: Walid Raad’s The Atlas Project, in Parachute 108, Montreal, 2002
Said, Edward W.; Orientalism, Vintage books, NY, 1979
Saliba, R. Beirut City Center Recovery: The Foch-Allenby and Etoile Conservation Area. Gottingen: Steidl,
2003.
Saliba, Robert. The Genesis of Modern Architecture in Beirut, 1840-1940, In Architecture Re-introduced: New
Projects in Societies in Change, edited by Jamal Abed Geneva: The Aga Khan Award for Architecture, 2004
Salti, Rasha, Women Under the Sun, ‘Ajram Beach for Women Only, in Bidoun
Sarkis, Hashim; Beirut, the Novel,
Silvetti, Jorge; Beirut and the Fact of Myth, , in “Projecting Beirut, episodes in the Construction and Reconstruction of a Modern City”, edited by Rowe, Peter and Sarkis, Hashim, Prestel, Munich, London, New York
Tabet, Jad; From Colonial Style to Regional Revivalism: Modern Architecture in Lebanon and the Problem of
Cultural Identity, in “Projecting Beirut, episodes in the Construction and Reconstruction of a Modern City”,
edited by Rowe, Peter and Sarkis, Hashim, Prestel, Munich, London, New York, 1997
Tabet, Jade with Ghorayeb, Marlene, Huybrechts, Eric, Verdeil, Eric; Beyrouth, Institut Francais d’Architecture,
2001
Thompson, Elizabeth; Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and
Lebanon, Columbia University Press, New York, 1999
Woods, Lebbeus War and Architecture (Part I: Meditations and Principles) in Pamphlet Architecture 15. New
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993.
Woods, Lebbeus War and Architecture (Part II: Tactics and Strategies).”in A&U. No. 2(281), February 1994,
6-35.
Le Corbusier, Le Voyage d’Orient Paris, Éditions Forces vives, 1966.
Le Corbusier, The radiant city; elements of a doctrine of urbanism to be used as the basis of our machine-age
civilization New York, Orion Press 1967
Abalos, Inaki and Herreros, Juan, Tower and office : from modernist theory to contemporary practice, Cambridge, MA ; London : MIT Press, 2003