The Porous City: A Search for Memory
and identity in Beirut
Nour Hamade History and Theory Studies Necromancing the Stone Fourth Year - Term One William Orr
One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory it is associated with objects and places. The city is the locus of the collective memory. This relationship between the locus and the citizenry then becomes the city’s predominant image, both of architecture and of landscape, and as certain artifacts become part of its memory, new ones emerge. In this entirely positive sense great ideas flow through the history of the city and give shape to it. Aldo Rossi1 Beirut, once named the Paris of the East, bears a rich history of resilience, vulnerability and heterogeneity. A city comprised of a wide spectrum of demographics, attempting to occupy and share space, living separately and together. “Beirut, maybe more than other cities, has explored all varieties of materialising difference, from the very cosmopolitan to the very tragic.”2 Architecture has had a long history of evoking memory. A structure, a landmark, a piece of land or an object could all share the same history. Each piece can physically encompass the history of the subject and its epoch. In order to understand the architecture of memory, one must understand the relationship that exists - or sometimes ceases to exist - between physical reality and mental meanings. In Rossi’s L’architettura della città (The Architecture of the City)3, originally published in 1966 and translated in 1982, he describes the city as architecture. His understanding of the city as architecture aims to recognise the importance of architecture as a discipline that has a self-determining autonomy. Architecture, in terms of Rossi, does not only inscribe the aesthetic quality of the visible image of the city, but also embraces the construction of the city overtime. Architecture as construction; it addresses the ultimate and definitive fact in the life of the collective.4 By linking the past with the present, Rossi defines the city as a collective; a collection of artefacts that have been accumulated overtime. The city represents time. Time shapes the city. Time (and place) create memory. Rossi’s understanding of continuity and permanence is crucial; the term locus5 is repeatedly used by Rossi to establish a relationship between a specific location and the buildings that are in it. The locus is determined by space and time. It is both singular and universal - able to embody the individual and the common. Furthermore, the time and place of analogy allows us to understand the city further. The time of analogy measures history and memory, where as the place of analogy recounts to a historic place and it’s associated memories. Rossi held the idea that the city remembers its past and uses those memories through the physicality of monuments, hence, monuments give structure to the city. Permanence; the past we are still experiencing. Permanence is the ability to remain; stable and unchanged, the object can then represent its epochs, eventually recasting itself as a monument - an artefact. Thus, the ability to understand the vitality of a building; its permanence as a monument becomes essential.
The City Lebanon has always been at the focus of Middle Eastern history and politics. With numerous biblical mentions, the country is represented as a place of strength and beauty. References to the country’s diverse landscapes, nature, history of violence, peace, beauty and tragedy evoke an almost mythical quality. Beirut, specifically, has witnessed an intense amount of forced change. The urban fabric of the city visualises the constant war between the intended heterogeneity of the urban form, and the mere individuality that results. The city could be described as a ‘myriad of islands,’6 a territory divided into fragments, each representing a specific agenda. Hitherto, the
1
Rossi, A., (1982). The Architecture of the City. trans. Ghirardo, D. & Ockman, J. Cambridge: MIT Press. p. 130
2
Herz, M., (2015). Beirut. In ETH Studio Basel, ed. The Inevitable Specificity of Cities. Baden: Lars Müller. p. 230.
3
Rossi, A., (1982). The Architecture of the City. trans. Ghirardo, D. & Ockman, J. Cambridge: MIT Press. p. 3.
4
Ibid. Rossi’s repeated use of the collective memory serves not as an abstract category of thought, but serves in determining the relationship between the urban fabric of
the city and those who inhabit it. 5
Ibid. p. 103. Rossi explains that the Locus is a relationship between a certain specific location and the buildings that are in it.
6
Herz, M., (2015). Beirut. In ETH Studio Basel, ed. The Inevitable Specificity of Cities. Baden: Lars Müller. p. 234.
fragments represented a specific religious affiliation, demonstrating a distinct social identity and way of life. Today, religious affiliation is replaced by political ideologies, a mean of occupying space as an access to power; both a foreshadow to the political climate to come and a mere representation of the city’s violent history. “The city of Beirut was at once the product, the object, and the project of imperial and urban politics of difference: overlapping European, Ottoman, and municipal civilising missions completed in the political fields of administration, infrastructure, urban planning… and architecture”.7 A monumental period of tragedy and development was the fifteen-year civil war. The conflict brought worldwide attention to the country due to its international involvement and affiliation with the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict. As political and religious differences were unfolding, the war broke out in 1975, dividing the city, which would eventually become part of the fragmented urban fabric. With the up-rise of the opposing fractions of the war, a demarcation line, named Beirut’s Green Line emerged. The Green Line8 divided the east and west of Beirut, forming a physical territorial boundary between the Christians in the east and the Muslims in the west. Historically, this line was a major artery that connected the city centre; the road gave the population an access to different parts of the city and allowed for an interaction between the different communities. Within the first two years of the war, by 1977, the city centre was practically wiped out and the old Damascus road became a physical barrier between the opposing fractions. The term Green Line appeared as a form of wartime sarcasm, emerging when grass and trees grew in streets and buildings that were destroyed and abandoned within Beirut’s buffer zone - allowing nature to occupy. The civil war ended in 1990, leaving a countless number of buildings in sheer devastation - the city of Beirut became an exhibition of destruction and devastation. Pertinent to Rossi’s ideology that the pre-eminent way of understanding the city is through its urban history; Beirut’s politicians, developers and forces attempted to erase all evidence of what once was. The new developments witnessed a mix of Neo-Ottoman, French colonial style façades following the modernist and post-modernist typologies. The city centre of Beirut experienced a paradigm shift; the city was remodelled to represent an image of success, cultural sophistication and historic richness. The bourgeoisie depiction of the city intended to reverse the happenings of the city and go back to the pre-war lifestyle of the elites. Despite their attempts, Beirut’s memory was annihilated along with its past urban fabric. Restarting by rebuilding the city was a mean of reinstating the political and economic regime of the country. Politics as Choice9 - Politics by Force. Since the war had already executed most of the demolition, a destruction and rebuild was facile; developers, politicians and the elites took over. The changes in uses and users constructed a city that had little in common with its pre-war precedent. At an attempt of balancing the ahistorical dimensional character of the new developments, archaeological excavations were presented on site in order to reveal Lebanon’s common past - a shared space in the form of a (physical) historical layer.
The Urban Artefact Beit Beirut,10 previously called the Barakat House, was designed and built in 1924 by Lebanese architect Youssef Aftimus. Commissioned by Nicholas Barakat and his family, the building served to house eight middle-class families until the outbreak of the civil war in 1975. Ultimately, the design of the building was recognised as sheer genius as the void that separated the two sides of the building was in fact a connecting void. The empty shell created a visual axes to the distinct parts of the city. An empty space behind the colonnade frontier, dividing the building, where two internal balconies, connected by a thin flying beam and a futile balustrade, faced each other. These two balconies, hidden by the front colonnade, represented the nature of the city at the time. Two sides, two ideologies, 7
Hanssen, J., (2005). Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital. Oxord: Clarendon Press. p. 4.
8
Verdeil, É., (2005). Plans for an unplanned city: Beirut (1950-2000). Worldview. Perspectives on Architecture and Urbanism from around the World, The Architectural
League of New York. Accessed 12 November 2019. https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00007780/document 9
Rossi, A., (1982). The Architecture of the City. trans. Ghirardo, D. & Ockman, J. Cambridge: MIT Press. p. 161. Refernce to chapter title: Politics as Choice.
10
Beit (Arabic) translates to ‘House.’ The building is publicly recognised as the ‘House of Beirut.’
two distinctive patterns of life, attempting to unify and shape a coalesced front - a mere attempt at the everlasting construction of the common. Despite the notion of unity; the design of the void as a visual axes to the city meant that surveillance was facile. During the war, the building housed Christian militiamen, acting as a form of shelter and vantage point for snipers. Its transparency and varied shooting angles were used for military purposes to control the surrounding area. That same void that allowed for communication and unity between the previous residents was used and abused in the war for violence. Due to its central, open location on the demarcation line that separated the warring fractions, the Barakat building was eminently helpful in overlooking the combat zone and the oppositions. Thus, function is blurred and the architect becomes a facilitator of war. The civil war brought utter defeat on the building and it soon became a paradigm of disrepair; an apparent trend within the city. “The ruin is rarely received merely in and of itself, for itself. It usually carries with it that which it is not - an absence, a loss, a hope, an ideal.”11 In other words, a ruins positivity and admiration stems from the objects of which it is missing. Its completeness, its full form, and its order must seem somewhat lost for it to be perceived as a ruin. Robert Ginsberg12 argues that ruin is in essence a building that has undergone a loss of function, at least with respect to its previous use. Consequently, the notion of ruin is then satisfied when a building loses, in essence, its former form and function; when it becomes essentially nothing. When the original identity is destroyed, purpose is demolished. Following the end of the war in 1990, Mona El-Hallak,13 a Lebanese architect and a heritage preservation activist, stood witnessing the demolition of war-torn buildings. Buildings that withstood fifteen years of violence, buildings that witnessed death, buildings that housed civilians, soldiers and weapons, were demolished and memories were lost. In 1994, El-Hallak stepped into the Barakat House for the first time, which would eventually become her long, rigorous attempt at reconstructing Beirut’s collective memory. Her belief is that the city is the sum of its people and their stories, and that maps are human, not geographic; the house is nothing without the tales of its inhabitants. The current existence of Beit Beirut is largely owed to El-Hallak’s initiative. Her relentless campaign against the building’s demolition by developers kept the artefact alive. She worked alongside another architect, Youssef Haidar, in order to transform the abandoned structure into what would become a museum for the memory of the city. The house comprises of two bourgeois style houses, four-stories tall, that are divided by a centralised courtyard that gives access to the staircases up to the previous properties and an underway passage that leads to a rear courtyard. The façades are connected by raised columns decorated with fine ironwork, overlooking the city. The challenge of the restoration project was to offer the inhabitants of Beirut a living cultural facility, “underscored by the recent history of the building.”14 The project entailed refurbishing the original house by Aftimus, whilst preserving the traces of time and war. One of the only buildings that was set to be revived, the remnants and relics of the buildings physical structure and the impacts of the war remained to highlight the unique character of the building and exhibit its evolution throughout the years. The buildings stands as an unusual structure that combines domestic architecture and ‘war architecture,’ which then forms a new archetype of cultural and museological reference; ultimately, the building gives testimony to Beirut’s rich past. An architectural style that strikes a balance between heritage and modernity, the building represents an artefact; an object that represents its history, alongside its context’s. The building was initially built in the Ottoman Revivalist style with locally sourced ochre coloured limestone - a traditional material that gave testimony to local craftsmanship. The renovation sought to maintain the presence of the Ottoman style as a tribute to Beirut’s colonial past; a mere depiction of the objects, documents and activities that would be housed within - the function. Rossi explains that “a monument’s persistence or permanence is a result of its capacity to constitute the city, its history and art, its being and memory.”15 The building was 11
Cairns, S. & Jacobs, J.M., (2014). Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press. p. 168.
12
Ginsberg, R., (2004). The Aesthetic of Ruins. Amsterdam: Rodopi. p. 33
13
El-Hallak, M. (2018). TED: From Violence to Remembrance, video recording. Accessed 14 November 2019. https://www.ted.com/talks/mona_hallak_from_violence_ to_remembrance_mona_el_hallak_tedxbaudebbieh 14
BeitBeirut, (2019). From the Yellow House. Accessed 13 November 2019. http://www.beitbeirut.org/english/thehouseen.html11
15
Rossi, A., (1982). The Architecture of the City. trans. Ghirardo, D. & Ockman, J. Cambridge: MIT Press. p. 60
restored as an act of reviving the forgotten history of the city, as a remembrance of the civil war. Its function changed from housing, to war shelter, to landmark and then incorporated the museum in order encompass the history of the building, its surrounding context, and the city (and country) as a whole. The ruin as matter, the ruin as form, the ruin as function, the ruin as symbol. The preservation, restoration and extension of Beit Beirut serves as example of architectural autonomy and reason. The Architecture of the City suggests that Rossi perceived urban planning as a limitation. Rossi repeatedly stressed on the importance of the unique conditions of shaping each and every place; the process of personifying the architecture of the city, made possible by its discourse about its disposition. Architecture could then manifest joy or sadness; “these sentiments were ingrained in urban artefacts and monuments, which were the urban background to the flow of people and their deeds.”16 Thus, the conflicting intentions of the architect and urban planners, developers and politicians are manifested in the fragmented result of Beirut. Where the clear distinctions between planning, preservation, design and memory lay. Here, the role of the architect as a preserver and dissenter demonstrate the necessity of architecture and the permanence of the artefact. The birth of the monument serves as the mere representation of the collective, in which Rossi argues “…from all this stems the idea of a city where the monuments represent fixed points of human creation, tangible signs of the action of reason, and collective memory.”17 The porousness that remains within the building in the form of bullet holes could be viewed as a physical lens into the past. The porous wall that looks into the fragmented remains of the city. A sole survivor in a rapidly rebuilt city. The Collective (Memory) Rossi’s integral concept of memory as history suggests that his ultimate belief is that memory is sufficient; that architecture can register memory and vis versa. The city’s artefacts and its peoples’ memories could ultimately encompass its history; that eventually, the urban fabric of the city can become an exhibition of its past. Arguably, time, space and context create an analogy. Rossi’s stance on the architectural autonomy and his critique of the modernists’ ideology of utopian planning, following the ‘failures’ of the modernist movement, stem from his learnings of the European city. The Architecture of the City was first published in 1966, long before the regeneration of the city of Beirut. However, the fifteen year conflict seemed to have paused architectural and urban development in Lebanon. The developers who aimed to restart the city’s urban form in 1990, following the end of the war, were still abiding by the modernist ideology of utopian planning. The attempt at reshaping the city as a new collective, as a whole, created architecture that was alienated. The economics and politics that drove the new developments envisioned the city as a space for all (the elites). In rebuilding parts of the city at a new dimension of modernity and wealth, it reinforced the previously fragmented city; what was once a division of religion and political affiliation became a division of a capitalist regime. Politics was ingrained in the urban fabric, and even formed it. Rossi’s emphasis on the prominence of the urban artefact is its ability to withstand history, and eventually become history. Beit Beirut served, and still serves, as an urban artefact that resisted history. The building did not only physically survive the combat and the violence that surrounded it, but was also occupied as a space of war. In constituting a sense of continuity, it determines the necessity of architecture as a mean of creating and reinforcing the collective memory. Rossi’s focus within his works and his writings depict his melancholic view on people, memories, architecture, planning and cities. His theories on memories and the collective suggest that in order to form an artefact, the object must go through some sort of disaster; human or natural, the acts of decay, obsolescence and war formulate the necessary reasoning to become a ruin. It could then be understood that the autonomy of architecture that Rossi repeatedly described was not to be perceived as architecture being autonomous in itself, distant from all external forces, but to hold the notion that architecture could be viewed independently as it encompasses all of those external forces within its form. Thus, architecture becomes a singular mechanism of understanding, reading and measuring
16
Loper, D.S, (2014). Melancholy and architecture : on Aldo Rossi. Zurich : Park Books. p. 112
17
Rossi, A., (2013). Architettura per i musei / Architecture for Museums. trans. Beltrandi, L., ed. Occhipinti, C. Accessed 9 November 2019. http://www.chiaraocchipinti.
net/immagini/publications/booklets/2013%20vitale/01%20-%20architettura%20per%20i%20musei.pdf.
history; a form that comprises of all the social, economic and political history of its epoch. History and memory have different conceptions of what is past and present. History informs us how and when something was constructed, but memory remembers what it chooses to remember - and that is what lives on. In the process of preventing the buildings obsolescence and transformation into an obsolete ruin; the memories of Beirut’s citizens - the collective memory - recovered the building and aided its rebirth. Instruments used by the collective memory to reconstruct an image of the past which is in accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society.18 Beirut, specifically Beit Beirut, presents the importance of memory in the formation of a monument. The formation of the monument in its material signs and form depict the specific events at a specific place. As one of the sole survivors of the Lebanese civil war, the now museum withstood the physical combat, the massive demolition plans for the city (during and after the war), and the postmodernisation of what remained. In a war between the collective memory and the political memory of the city, preservation, design and the architect acted as barriers against the destruction of what was to become an urban artefact - ultimately, an attempt at destructing the collective memory. The city remains fragmented with its various religions, social classes and political agendas; despite the chaos of the city, Beit Beirut acts as a lens towards the porousness of the heterogeneous fragments, their histories, their people’s histories and ultimately forms the homogeneous identity that Beirut perpetually desired.
18
Halbwachs, M., (1992). On Collective Memory. trans. & ed. Coser, L.A. Chicago: Chicago University Press. p. 40
1: The Green Line; Map. 2: The Green Line; Nature Occupies.
(Left to right) 3: Demolition plans of Beirut; 1982 - today. 4: Synthesis of the mental images provided by the various age groups depicting the main areas and landmarks that they remember in the city before the war; the area which encompasses most of the new developments post-war. The collective memory of Beirut’s inhabitants convey the objects, landmarks, monuments and streets that remain in their grieved memory. 5: Solidere; the up-rise in the Neo-Ottoman and French colonial style façades. 6: Solidere;the up-rise in the Neo-Ottoman and French colonial style façades. 7: Exhibited Excavations; An attempt at balancing the ashistorical shift.
8: The Urban Artefact; 1994.
(Top to bottom; left to right) 9: Form and Function; an attempt at reviving the collective memory. 10: Beit Beirut; 2018. 11: Beit Beirut; 2018. 12: Beit Beirut; 2018.
13: The Porous City; a view into the fragmented dimensions of Beirut.
Selected Bibliography Aureli, P.V., (2011). Possibility of an Absolute Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press Cairns, S. & Jacobs, J.M., (2014). Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press. El-Hallak, M. (2018). TED: From Violence to Remembrance, video recording. Accessed 14 November 2019. https://www.ted.com/ talks/mona_hallak_from_violence_to_remembrance_mona_el_hallak_tedxbaudebbieh Ginsberg, R., (2004). The Aesthetic of Ruins. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Halbwachs, M., (1992). On Collective Memory. trans. & ed. Coser, L.A. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hanssen, J., (2005). Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital. Oxord: Clarendon Press. Herz, M., (2015). Beirut. In ETH Studio Basel, ed. The Inevitable Specificity of Cities. Baden: Lars Müller. Loper, D.S, (2014). Melancholy and architecture : on Aldo Rossi. Zurich : Park Books. Najem, T., (2002). Lebanon : the Politics of a Penetrated Society. London: Routledge. Orr, W. (2019). Constructing the Collective: Authorship and Political Will in Aldo Rossi’s “Theory of Architecture” [retrieved from author]. Otero-Pailos, J., Langdalen, E.F. & Arrhenius, T. eds., (2016). Experimental Preservation. Baden: Lars Müller. Qantara, (2009). One Woman’s Fight to Preserve Beirut’s Architectural Heritage [online]. Accessed 19 November 2019. https:// en.qantara.de/content/lebanon-one-womans-fight-to-preserve-beiruts-architectural-heritage Rossi, A., (1981). A Scientific Autobiography. trans. Venuti, L. Cambridge, MA ; London: MIT Press. Rossi, A., (1982). The Architecture of the City. trans. Ghirardo, D. & Ockman, J. Cambridge: MIT Press. Rossi, A., (2013). Architettura per i musei / Architecture for Museums. trans. Beltrandi, L., ed. Occhipinti, C. Accessed 9 November 2019. http://www.chiaraocchipinti.net/immagini/publications/booklets/2013%20vitale/01%20-%20architettura%20per%20 i%20musei.pdf. Studio Beirut, (2009). Beyroutes : a guide to Beirut. ed. Ernsten, C. Amsterdam: Archis The Planisphere, (2009). Mona Hallak on ‘Beit Beirut’ [online]. Accessed 19 November 2019. https://www.johnzada.com/planisphere/ mona-hallak-barakat-beit-beirut/ Venturi, R., (1977). Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. 2nd ed. London: Architectural Press. Verdeil, É., (2005). Plans for an unplanned city: Beirut (1950-2000). Worldview. Perspectives on Architecture and Urbanism from around the World, The Architectural League of New York. Accessed 12 November 2019. https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/ halshs-00007780/document Yan, V., (2018). Building Beit Beirut, A History Museum In A City That Tries To Forget. Accessed 16 November 2019. https://www. worldcrunch.com/culture-society/building-beit-beirut-a-history-museum-in-a-city-that-tries-to-forget
Figure Credits 1: Habib, M., (1997). The Beirut Green Line, 1975 - 1990. ed. Hamade, N. Accessed 24 November 2019. http://almashriq.hiof.no/ lebanon/900/910/919/beirut/greenline/index.html 2: Abbas, A., (1982). Beirut The Green Line - 1982. ed. Hamade, N. Accessed 24 November 2019. http://www.lebanoninapicture.com/ pictures/beirut-the-green-line-1982 3: Schmid, H., (n.d.). Map of Beirut prepared by Schmid showing the war-destroyed fabric, the post-war destroyed fabric, and the preserved fabric of the city. ed. Hamade, N. Accessed 27 November 2019. http://www.csbe.org/material-on-water-conservation-1 4: The Department of Architecture, American University of Beirut, (1991). Morphological Investigation of Downtown Beirut: Towards an Urban Design Framework. ed. Hamade, N. Accessed 27 November 2019. http://www.csbe.org/material-on-waterconservation-1 5: [Own image] Hamade, N., (2018). Solidere. JPEG file. 6: [Own image] Hamade, N., (2018). Solidere. JPEG file. 7: [Own image] Hamade, N., (2018). Downtown Beirut: Excavation. JPEG file. 8: Colin, M., (2018). Lebanon’s Civil War Ghosts Linger Despite Efforts To Heal Old Wounds. Image source unknown. ed. Hamade, N. Accessed 24 November 2019. https://medium.com/@beaurepaire10/lebanons-civil-war-ghosts-linger-despite-efforts-to-healold-wounds-b9e78204b6e5 9: Nakhle, R., (n.d.). Archtitecte - Beit Beirut : Centre Culturel. ed. Hamade, N. Accessed 27 November 2019. https://cargocollective. com/ritanakhle/Beit-Beirut-Centre-Culturel 10: [Own image] Hamade, N., (2018). Beit Beirut. JPEG file. 11: [Own image] Hamade, N., (2018). Beit Beirut. JPEG file. 12: [Own image] Hamade, N., (2018). Beit Beirut. JPEG file. 13: Collage by Hamade, N. Image of hole: Hamade, N., (2018). Porous Tube. JPEG file.
Image of a destructed Beirut: thebusinessyear, (2019). Building up Downtown. Image source unknown. ed. Hamade, N. Accessed 24 November 2019. https://www.thebusinessyear.com/lebanon-2015/building-up-downtown/photo-essay