Min Bʻīd la-Bʻīd (from Far to Far): On Homemaking under Diasporic Conditions

Luna BuGhanem

SMArchS Architectural Design

Advisor: Ana Miljački

Reader: Huma Gupta

In the villages of Mount-Lebanon, homes are realized through years of immigrants’ remittances, messages, objects, and visits. This thesis offers an expanded understanding of the homes and homemaking of diasporic families, through which they manage separation and fragmentation and adapt to personal and regional political change.

To reveal how diasporic subjects build their homes while and from abroad or back and forth between locales, I extract from and analyze my conversations with owners of remittance-funded houses in ’Aley and Shūf. In videos reconstructing the homes-in-progress, I juxtapose first-hand accounts, concurrent global events, and the material traces of migration to make apparent the relationships between distance, its mediations, and the built form.

In doing so, this thesis re-imagines several signature architectural concepts. In the first chapter, “site” is no longer understood to simply be location, where the building is bound by coordinates or where owners have to be physically present. Instead, the site, as captured through WhatsApp images, becomes dispersed. Each following chapter similarly re-imagines and expands our use of architectural concepts such as “budget,” “program,” “phases,” “finishes,” “furniture, fixtures,” and “contracts” to suggest how we may appropriate this new understanding as a design tool.

Ultimately, this thesis establishes the human experience of immigrantbuilders as central, not ancillary to the discipline of architecture.