Sex, Ruin(s) & (3rd) Space: Queer Space Production and Heritage Restoration in Beirut
Nour Hamade Architectural Association 2020/2021 Fifth Year Diploma 6
Past: Boudoir, Enlightenment France, 17th Century
Sex, Sulk and (Third) Space “Small closet, very confined cabinet, adjacent to the room one normally occupies, apparently thus named because of the habit of retiring there, to sulk unseen, when one is in a bad mood.” 1 Pout, sulk, think, retreat. In itself, it is a room with levels, depth and hierarchy - a space where power is reflected and division is evident. At the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, “codes regulating the coarse, the obscene and the indecent”2 were quite permissive. By the days of the Victorian Bourgeoisie, sexuality was carefully confined; in the home. This comes with the birth of Enlightenment France, which saw an increasing demand for the autonomy of the individual and an augmented demand for privacy.3 The importance of private life and the concern with manifesting a sound masculine order within the domestic spaces gave rise to a gender dichotomy. An increase in polarisation is visible in the transformation of the Rococo hotel into the increasingly gendered and private Neoclassical hotel. Defined as the “locus classicus of sexual intrigue,” 4 the erotically saturated space situates itself in on the far side of the feminine spectrum. Gender is prescribed and the space became associated with female sexuality, “(it) is regarded as the abode of delight; here she seems to reflect on her designs and to yield to her inclinations.’5 The wall can be envisioned as a development for the increased demand of privacy. The systems that divided the house from the Renaissance onward, where European domestic architecture increasingly worked to produce privacy by defining and re-defining the spaces of the house that mapped the social order. The process of drawing lines between hierarchies of propriety to deduce the complex order of layered spaces. Wrigley describes it as “the new order of the house.”6 By delineating spaces for the family, each individual member is given a plotting rule of protocols that determine the specific spaces in which they are ‘allowed’ to occupy. In addition, these lines also distinguished the familial spaces and those for visitors - maintaining a division between the public and the private (and the private-private). The term ‘public’ implies the highest level of inclusivity, therefore the public sphere should inherently be open to all bodies. However, most institutions of the public sphere excluded both women and the lower classes. The ways in which these bodies are excluded from space convey the ways in which they are removed from the systems which operate and shift cultural change. The bourgeoisie began by defining its own sex as something of vast importance, or as Foucault described, “a fragile treasure and a secret that had to be discovered at all costs.”7 Nonetheless, the first figure to be sexualised was the ‘idle’ woman. The notion of the space as an erotic site existed long before the space was physically present in architecture. Its erotic persona can be understood as part of a long literary tradition that has associated eroticism with gardens and certain architectural forms. The bourgeoisie symbolically designed, formed and sexualised a class body; a body with its health, hygiene, descent and race. This process was linked to the movement by which it asserted its distinctiveness and its dominance, inducing specific class effects. As an erotic space it was the antithesis of the discursive space of the ‘reception room in a large house’. These rooms were defined as ‘female controlled venues’,8 albeit still controlled through silence, the ways in which they are placed within the house suggest that surveillance by the master was dominant. The women would have to pass through the semi-public familial spaces to reach these spaces of solitude - an agency of control. The object then represents the ambiguity of space. The room becomes the image of that privatisation of gendered space, where the complete and imaginative use of the binary as an ordering device is exploited. It is the result of the juxtaposition between physical fact and psychic effect. From the private-private to the most public of spaces, the movement of women within Eighteenth Century France remained controlled and constrained by the authorisation of their male counterparts. The transposition of the feminine spaces of the salon and the boudoir is symbolic of the process by which Eighteenth-Century women were rendered ‘aneu logou’, without a public voice. Through time, the movement of female bodies within the scale of the city shifts from that of a strong political voice to that of secrecy and privacy; the room itself then becomes a Third Space where these bodies exploit their limitations and shift the use of the space into radical intellectual conversations between women, which then transpose into the more public spaces of the city, eventually becoming crucial figures in the French Revolution and cultural change. “Tantôt sombre et rêveuse, et comme en ton boudoir, Tu renfonçois ton gris, et me montrois ton noir.” Jean-Antoine du Cerceau9
Cultural re-generation
Reformative social movements
Revolutionairy social movements
al )
Pr
lob (G lic ub -P
te iva
te-Private iva
Pr
lic ub e i-P rivat i-P
Se Se m m
Pu bl i c
Pu bli c
Present: Queer Bodies, Beirut, Lebanon, 2020
An individual imprisoned in the eye of the public.
The individual incessantly reconstructs their identity.
Gestures and seduction manifest as requisites amongst Queer people.
ashrafieh69 is 137 metres away.
Objects present the mirrored queer version of the self-enclosed identity.
Activism, protests and riots serve as the platforms (spaces) of visibility.
Sexuality confined in the darkness of the bedroom, or the phone.
Queer space offers a clear model for such an architectural counter-artifice.
Queer space cannot be created or designed simply as a safe space.
Queer space is the space of activism and inclusion.
Future: Bäyt Akhár, Beirut, Lebanon, 2021-
َََ ٓٓ
Destructed house
Structural maintenance Structural rehabilitation
Access points appointed
Intermediary spaces created Informal circulation and communication Interior reconstruction and division
Private and public use
Spaces of communication designed
Care of disorientated bodies
Additional public sphere formed
Heritage buildings returned to the city
Co-existing
Chaos
Mapping out potential sites of intervention
The following map exercises were utilised to extract potential sites of intervention in a city with minimal urban planning. This allowed me to visualise the locations of parcels, post-war structures, heritage buildings, evicted buildings and the plethora of damaged structures. Using GIS data and techniques; areas, land type, building type, building year, mobility of the city etc. were utilised in order to created a layered sequence in order to extrapolate potential sites and buildings; then investigating those that require immediate care.
Plot
Introducing a grid to the chaos of the urban fabric of Beirut, presenting the existing plots of land, also called ‘parcels,’ and the radii of the impact of the explosion.
Existing Buildings
Building blueprints of the city pre-blast.
Too Small to Build
These are not buildings, but plots of land (called ‘parcels’) that are below 100 m2, deemed unbuildable as sole plots. These are owned both privately and publicly and are usually backed up by ownership fraud. They currently house the majority of parking lots that are scattered around the city, some illegally. These present potential sites of additional interventions, scattering the queer fragments around the city. The 1954 zoning law specified that 35 square meters is the minimum allowable buildable plot size. In 1973, this article was annulled from the 1954 zoning law. Today, in zone 3 for instance, the minimum buildable plot has to have an area of 120 square meters for existing plots, and 300 square meters for newly parceled plots. Such constraints on building in small plots are among the key reasons pushing small owners to sell their properties to large investment companies, hence majorly shifting the historic social constitution of neighbourhoods.
Post-Civil War
Buildings that were permitted after the end of the civil war in 1990, many of which are owned by developers that have destructed and rebuilt more than 30% of the city.
The Right to Demolish
Buildings that have received permits for demolition betweeen 2014 and 2018. 193 buildings in the city were granted permits for demolition, 26 of which were heritge buildings dating back pre-1940’s. Some post-civil structures were also included to allow for new higher skyscrapers to take over the city.
Evicted
Buildings that were evicted pre-blast as part of new developments. 7 of those buildings were heritage structures (pre-1940’s). This also presents some of the city’s occupants that have been kicked out (or paid off ) by developers in order to re-shape the city
Impacts of the ‘Blast’
The impacts on the fabric of the city; the more densely hatched areas show the heaviest impacts, possibly where buildings have been completely destroyed. Over 8,000 buildings in the city were damaged. 83 structures concentrated in the historic quarters of Gemayzeh and Mar Mikhael were affected.
Layers of (dis)Order
The layering of maps to extract certain plots or buildings that relate to different implications. These sites highlight the most in need spaces that require care, and can potentially be made productive as spaces for queer initiatives. 250 heritage buildings are potentially extracted from the mapping exercise, whilst 83 of those structure sit around the 5km impact radius. After a walk around the entire city, some final sites were discovered and presented in the following pages.
Heritage
Structures within the Focus Area
Example heritage sites in Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhael: “Heritage is commonly understood as a process of con- scious, purposeful remembrance for the political, cul- tural or economic needs of those in the present; it involves a subjective representation of valued objects, significant persons, places and symbolic events of the past, closely allied with issues of identity and power. . . . More especially so, post-colonial societies, following their at- tainment of independence from colonial rule, tend to be preoccupied with issues of representation and defining a new identity, for which selected aspects of the past under- stood as heritage serve as inspiration or foundation. The seizing of selfrepresentation is often a key prerogative, as these societies attempt to complement (and complete) political freedom with a “decolonization of the mind.” These heritage structures present the many buildings in which this project could be replicated. Most of what has been, and still is being, debated pertains to Beirut’s colonial heritage, this includes the period from the second half of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century. During this time, the medieval city was partially razed as part of the Ottoman modernising reforms (1900–1916) and then duly Haussmannized (the regeneration of Paris) under the French Mandate (1920s–1930s). Because of this timing, the buildings and townscapes of this period may be qualified simultaneously as “colonial” and “early modern.” On the one hand, their conservation thus raises the issue of assimilating the colonial legacy as an integral part of national heritage, and on the other, it raises the issue of qualifying early modern architecture as eligible for conservation. Quote from: S. Marschall, (2008). “The Heritage of PostColonial Societies,” in B. Graham and P. Howard, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity. Hampshire: Ashgate. p. 347
Stills from film by author:
What happens when there are no systems of care or rehabilitation? The mirrored depiction of a ruin and the other
Gradient of Spaces: From the Object to the City