PARALIT

PARALIT

ARCHITECTS FOR CHANGE

THE PARADOXES

Architects for Change is a non-profit youth collective, based in Beirut. Founded in 2014, the organization envisions to develop a leading community of young, active architects and designers in Lebanon. Under the three fundamental pillars of education, social impact, and youth development, Architects for Change endeavors to provide architecture and design students – as well as young professionals – with a platform to expand their learning experience beyond the classroom setting, as it foregrounds the essential role of architecture and design regarding social impact and sustainable development.

Timely

Timeless

These two aspects gather under the destructive and melancholic ever-going aspect of time; how it both releases things into oblivion and puts decaying pieces into merit. This is glimpsed in design: the gradual fading of the new pieces into the background as the ancient ones rise to sanctity.

Utopia

Dystopia

The ancient pursuit of man to seek perfection and affluence leads us to utopia: the design of the sovereign and the virtuous. However, can the defective create the seamless? This paradox reviews our continuous quarrel between perfection and reality in the realm of design and its integration.

Shocking

Plain

It is a debate between the breathtaking and the breath-giving. A discussion that revises aesthetical, alarming avant-garde design, everyday design, and the thread in-between.

Absorbing

Absorbed

The question of scale and how it alters the relationship between the stratagem and its subject, following the emotional feedback of the recipient. This chapter re-reads ratio as a means to either swallow or be swallowed by consumption.

Legal

PARALIT Paralit is an online bimonthly magazine, initiated by Architects for Change. It provides the reader with a platform for cross-disciplinary, social and critical thinking, within the framework of architecture and design.

Themes that are related to social issues are rarely ever featured in an architectural and design context on a local scale. And when they are, the approach is handled in a manner that drives us to believe that there is no alternative (pre-conceived notions of normative acceptance). Our inquiry delves into proposing multiple realities of opposing nature to expose them as both concurrent and coexisting entities. Paralit aims to inspire a discourse of forward thinking in an attempt to redefine social constructs.

Team Leader: Rabih Koussa Team: Mounira Halabi, Aya Mohanna, Nader Akoun, Nayla Noueihed, Maya Zahwi, & Aya Zantout Supervised by: Katia Zahwi Graphics: Abbas Sbeity Illustration: Lara Abi Saber Editor: Joe Poladian

Illegal

The most restraining and imperative tool ever created by civilizations: the law often directs the main parameters for strategic designing. However, when does the constitution contradict our ethics? And what are the aspects of conflict between humans and their very own rulebook?

This oxymoron assesses the clash between regulations and benevolence and searches for common ground.

Public

Private

The wrangle between boundaries—the nonstop natural reclaim of things as our own—and the higher act of sharing. All these aspects emerge in design and in the way our realms are erected, based on a magnitude of inclusivity and embrace. It is an inconsistency born from the inter-dimensional relationships between private spaces and the bigger scope of the public, all the way to our global home and national lines.

ISSUE 0 THEME: HAVEN

Haven (n.): a place of safety or refuge.

It is that the soul emerges from euphoria; it is that the body brushes the soil. The stems root from the granule earth, but do they belong to it?

The wilderness of where we come from is Haven to so many, yet hazard to so many others. Amidst the accretion of shifting landscapes—like scabs over the wounds of terrain scraped by war and natural catastrophe—a reality of our own formation has transfigured into a struggle to seek refuge in a world without clarity, certainty, or meaning. The state of this same world is the harvest of its occupants’ design: their designs of politics, of economy, of rights… Has the design of our architecture contributed to ill-refuge? To Haven? And to what more? To what do we owe the future?

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS Deadline – Friday, June 30, 2017.

We are now open for submissions in the forms of analytical or creative writing, conceptual artwork, architectural renderings, graphic design, and illustrations (accompanied by a short descriptive text).

All works should relate to the theme of Issue 0. The theme ‘Haven’ challenges you to reinterpret the subject of Refuge, in light of one of the six paradoxes — a proposition of multiple realities; their disposition as concurrent and coexisting.

Please send your submission to paralit@architectsforchange.org, along with a 100-word biography, your preferred contact details, and a digital copy of your work.

Accepted formats: .pdf, .jpeg, .png, .tif, .doc, .zip, under 15MB. CONTACT INFO info@architectsforchange.org + 961 81 661 996