GHOST: Memory, Abandon, and Speculative Futures for the Structures of Beirut

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Introduction “Three different narrative frameworks that have often been used to make sense of [Beirut’s] temporality are subsumed under the same chronotope. The narrative of mythical rebirth, the narrative of an imminent apocalypse and the narrative of unresolved trauma all rely on teleological temporalities in which the present is reduced to a transitional phase. However, this transitional phase has been dragging on for 25 years at the time of writing” — Judith Naeff, Precarious Imaginaries of Beirut: A City’s Suspended Now

Beirut’s abandoned structures serve as a perpetually adapting memorial and a site of healing and regeneration. Lebanon’s devastating Civil War (1975-1990), and the ever ensuing conflicts, are present in Beirut’s physical makeup as well as the population’s psyche. This collection of writings, photographs, and illustrations unpacks the broader implications of a city mending sectarian based conflicts through redevelopment in a study of three specific abandoned structures. These particular buildings stand as remnants from Beirut’s “Golden Age,” a time of economic and cultural prosperity between 1950 and 1975, and were all left in various stages of completion due to the war. Today, these structures are used by Beirutis as party venues, sites of protests, and visual markers of a still tumultuous cityscape.

The shifting meanings of buildings like The Holiday Inn, Burj Al Murr, and The Egg can become a lens through which to consider Beirut’s complex history and relationship with public urban spaces.

Throughout this study, I consider what reconstruction and healing look like in a state of continued exposure to violence.

A collection of photographs and video montages serve as visual artifacts

to examine the intersection of architecture and violence alongside existing literature on Beirut. These images add a humanistic element, and remind viewers of the spatial implications essential to the project.

Captured in these informal video clips and photos is a collective fascination with physical destruction and reclamation among Beirut’s youth today.

In one edited video montage, inserted between scenes of a warehouse party, are contrasting images of various abandoned spaces existing unactivated. In these moments of stillness, the structure becomes the character in focus. What does it mean to give these “unwanted” structures an active role in creating a national memory, one that is counter to the overbearing false narrative enforced by the political power and capitalistic reconstruction efforts?

Overlaid on top of these scenes are visions of the Arabic graffiti, being translated in real time by the Google Translate app. The inclusion of this clip speaks to the role of technology in today’s revolution, and it’s capacity to serve as an equalizing force in an environment so stratified by class and language barriers. In this video piece, the editing technique of layering video portrays the intense layering of time that makes these structures so captivating.

The Holiday Inn was once a glamorous destination, a lavish hotel built during Lebanon’s development bubble in the years leading up to the Civil War. The Holiday Inn became a central figure in the Battle of the Hotels, becoming the symbolic demarcation between the Lebanese Front and the National Movement. The interior of the hotel was raided, stripped and sold throughout the city1. The Holiday Inn eventually became a trophy in battle, both strategic and symbolic.

Since the war, the building’s future remains unknown. The deeply scarred facade of the building speaks to the devastation of the war, and serves as one of the most iconic examples of the still unresolved destruction of Beirut.

Shareholders of the original hotel cannot decide whether to renovate or demolish the building. As of now, the structure remains closed to the public, but was once a famed site of underground raves.

The Burj Al Murr, coincidentally translated as the “Tower of Bitterness”2 is an abandoned and unfinished 40-story tower in Beirut’s Minet-el-Hosn hotel district of

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downtown Beirut. The tower, like the Holiday Inn, was central in The Battle of the Hotels, which was one of the first fronts of the Lebanese Civil War that began in April 1975.

The building was originally intended to be a hotel or office space, but its ultimate use was as a notorious sniper posting during the war. Today it remains, bullet riddled and empty, a scar on the skyline. Since the war, the building has been a fascination for Beirut based artists. One example is Artist Jad El Khoury, who, in 2018, placed colorful pieces of cloth in each window hole of the concrete frame, adding a pop of color to the otherwise gloomy structure. The image of colorful cloth billowing in the wind may at first seem like an effort to enliven the building, but in reality the installation begs the question of occupancy, drawing on familiar imagery of hanging linens characteristic of life in Beirut to emphasize the lifeless reality of the structure.

The Egg, like Burj Al Murr, was under construction during the outbreak of the civil war and so was left unfinished. The building was part of a commercial redevelopment project aiming to revitalize and modernize

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Beirut’s city center. The Egg is rather beloved among students and architects, who mobilized during talks of its demolition in an effort to preserve the structure. As a result, plans to preserve and integrate the Egg into a new redevelopment project were supposedly approved by the landowners.

The Egg’s post-war treatment has been distinct from Burj Al Murr and The Holiday Inn. This could be due to the structure’s identity as a byproduct of war as opposed to a strategic site of violence . During the most recent protests in Beirut the fall of 2019, the Egg was activated as a site of protest and gathering. The movement, deemed “Eggupation,” consisted of a series of talks and lectures by academics, artists, and students. The topics included capitalism, economic crisis, national identity, and the fall of the regime.

All three of these structures represent various states of states of decay and destruction, played differing roles during

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the active violence of war, and have since adopted unique roles in the debate of the reconstruction of Beirut. Each building can be understood through one of Naeff’s narrative frameworks; mythical rebirth, imminent apocalypse, and unresolved trauma.

The visual aspect of this thesis imagines speculative futures for Beirut and it’s abandoned spaces, and what it might look like to radically challenge the current reconstruction narrative of forgetting violence and conflict in favor of an imaginary past.

1. Moe-Ali Nayel, “Beirut’s bullet-riddled Holiday Inn - a history of cities in 50 buildings, day 28,” The Guardian, May 1, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/ may/01/beirut-holiday-inn-civil-war-history-cities-50buildings 2. Murr is a family name but coincidentally translates to ‘bitterness’, causing some english websites to wrongly dub the structure ‘The Tower of Bitterness.’ While fitting, this translation caused my friends to laugh very hard...

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On The War(s), Solidere, and Displacement “Through the selective displacement of citizens or their removal from view, the state reclaimed the process of constituting national and political identities from within the heart of the capital city. The physical destruction of the city and its long reconstruction become forms of collective therapy in which the ‘death’ of the city—its ‘cleansing’ so to speak—is meant to rid the nation of memories of the multitude of deaths that continue to haunt its making.”

— Maha Yahya, Let the Dead be Dead

“No one really knows what happened,” my friend Tima tells me over the Skype call, referring to her own personal experience with the war. She goes on to explain how, upon arriving in Beirut from Syria in 2011, none of her new friends would dare discuss with her the events of the civil war that took place almost a decade before they were born. In interviewing friends and family members currently living in Beirut, everyone confirms that they never learned an official narrative of the war from any sort of institutional authority, only piecing together the country’s recent traumatic history from hearsay and biased accounts.

To add to the confusion, this lack of a clear official narrative was compounded every day by the surrounding urban fabric, so rapidly changing that in a few years time, certain neighborhoods became completely unrecognizable. Destruction from the past, in the form of bullet-scarred facades and shelled out buildings, is now complemented by the rapid and violent destruction of redevelopment.

“It feels like a ghost,” my other friend, Léa, chimes in. “You can see the war all around you, but no one talks about it...out of fear I think. Peace, especially now, is really only hanging on by a thread.” Visible in the background behind her are colorful print renditions of the buildings in question, comic-book like drawings of the Egg and Burj Al Murr. The fact that Léa, a Beiruti who encounters these buildings regularly, chooses to have their image hung up in her bedroom, is testament to these structures’ significance and emotional value. To her, they are loving images of Beirut, a symbol of a ‘Real Beirut.’

In order to fully understand how these structures came to be, and why their continued existence is so critical to the narrative of reconstruction in postwar Beirut, we must dive into the history of Lebanon and the conditions that create such state-level amnesia.

Briefly, Lebanon and the war(s).

Since Lebanon attained its independence from France after World War II, the small country has witnessed two civil upsets, the first a crisis between Maronite Christians and Muslims in 1958 requiring U.S. intervention, and the second a civil war lasting from 1975 to 1991. The latter is believed to have killed 144,000 and wounded another 200,0003 as well as displaced over 9000 families, destroyed an estimated 18,000 homes, and caused 12,000 families to live in dwellings not designated for human habitation, such as commercial buildings, industrial centers, and buildings liable to collapse4.

Additionally, Lebanon sustained a growing population of Palestinian refugees after 1948, resulting in increased religious tensions within the national population as well as conflict with neighboring Israel. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) aligned with Muslim and Druze minority militias of Southen Lebanon during the Civil War, and mounted a campaign against Israel accross the Lebanese border. To radically simplify the narrative, the IsraeliLebanese conflict consists of a series of military conflicts with various militia groups in Lebanon in 1978, 1982, and 20065. Both Israel and Syria, and by extension postIslamic Revolution Iran, have been heavily involved in Lebanese internal affairs, operating through opposing militant groups such as Hezbollah and the South Lebanon Army (SLA), even after formally withdrawing troops in 2005.

Since 2005, a string of assassinations, regular street riots, another Israeli war on Lebanon, and conflict between the 13

Lebanese army and jihadist militias has created a national state of seemingly permanent chaos, violence, and upheaval6.

Lebanon’s population is best described as ethno-religious rather than sectarian alone. A good example of how deeply religion plays into everyday life in Lebanon is the fact that only clergy can officiate a marriage, meaning that if a mixed-religion couple wishes to hold a civil union and forego the religious traditions dictating conversion, they must petition to have their marriage recognized by the state. Not only are these instances rare, but they are almost never recognized by the interior ministry or religious institutions7.

The last Lebanese census was taken in 1932 by French mandate authorities and, up until the Taif Agreement of 1989, remained as the only basis for the breakdown of parliamentary seats along religious lines, dividing 128 seats accordingly to Maronites (29%), Sunnis (23%), Shiites (20%), Greek Orthodox (10%), and Druze (6%). The relative distribution of seats was to remain 6:5 Christian:Muslim8. One of the major results of the Civil War, as outlined in the Taif Agreement, was the redistribution of seats to 50:50 Christian:Muslim. However, given the proportionally higher Maronite, Christian Orthodox, and Druze emigration from Lebanon and proportionally higher birth rates among Shiite and Sunni populations, it is generally assumed that the Muslim population outnumbers that of all the Christian sub-groups combined and are thus underrepresented in the current political model9.

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16 This lack of resolve and representation per the Taif Agreement, the general amnesty the agreement granted war criminals, and the continued involvement of politicians largely at fault for the war has allowed for a continued state of tension and turmoil in Lebanon long after the Civil War’s official end. In this study, it is critical to acknowledge my focus on Beirut, and specifically Downtown Beirut. Southern Lebanon, and therefore mostly the Shiite population, has long been excluded from the construction of a mainstream Lebanese national identity, beit in the form of politics, art, literature, government spending, etc. and has therefore suffered disproportionately from ongoing violence10. Yet, Beirut is also home to nearly half of the country’s population, and understanding the city’s cyclical rise and fall throughout history is critical in understanding the nation as a whole. A future for Lebanon begins with a future for Beirut.

3. Lucia Volk, Memorials and Martyrs in Modern Lebanon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 4.

4. Aseel Sawalha, “‘Healing the Wounds of the War’: Placing the War-displaced in Postwar Beirut,” in Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction In a Globalized World, ed. Ida Susser and Jane Schneider (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 276.

5. Laura Eisenberg, “Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?: Israel and Lebanon after the Withdrawal,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 4, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 17-31.

6. Volk, 4.

7. Martin Chulov, “Society couple said ‘I do’ - but Lebanon won’t accept that they are married,” The Guardian, August 25, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ aug/25/lebandon-high-society-wedding-tests-civilfreedom.

8. Volk, 6.

9. Volk, 8 10. Volk, 166

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“The Solidere plan for downtown Beirut called for building a man-made island, a petit Manhattan connected by bridges to the old city. The planners sketched two tall towers evoking the World Trade Center and a boulevarde wider than the Champs Elysees in Paris. At work here was a kind of deep fantasy expressing what most residents of Beirut feel: the desire to forget. For both the government and Solidere, the stated goal was to restore Beirut to its pre-war role as Lebanon’s premier center for banking and financial services, commerce and tourism, with as much dispatch as possible” —Aseel Sawalha, “Healing the Wounds of the War”: Placing the War-displaced in Postwar Beirut

The Civil War and its impact on Beirut can be understood in two phases: that of active violence during the war and the following mass displacement and reconstruction in the years afterwards.

Beirut before the war was Lebanon’s financial center, where a laissez-faire economy bolstered educational and cultural institutions, and the thriving city was renowned as the jewel of the Middle East. With the outbreak of the civil war, the creation of a militarized ‘green line,’ a 10 mile no man’s land, cut through the city to divide a Christian eastern zone from a Muslim west, completely closing off the city’s once vital center. Evacuated buildings were converted to military bases, businesses relocated or shut down completely, and the vast majority of Beirutis were forced to leave11.

The destruction of Beirut was near total. It is estimated that one quarter of all housing units and many historic and religious sites were damaged by artillery fire or even bulldozed to facilitate military operations12. Yet despite the devastating destruction of this urban fabric, and the onslaught of violence that forced many urbanites to evacuate, Beirut during this period witnessed a substantial influx of rural Lebanese fleeing even dimmer prospects in the surrounding countryside. These populations came to partake in a bustling informal economy that had emerged among the divided militia-ruled neighborhoods, moving into an abundance of unoccupied space regardless of whether the spaces 19

were designed for human habitation or fully operational as such13. For these people, who had over the course of 16 years become urbanized and entrenched in their local economies, cultures, and rituals, what came after the war was yet another form of violence. As the State, real estate developers, and the legal property owners sought to return and capitalize on the postwar reconstruction effort, those who did not have the resources to flee, and instead had continued to make the most of their haphazard situation, suddenly felt turned upon once again by their own people.

A key player in the reconstruction of Beirut is Solidere, a company founded in 1994 by then Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, whose impact on Beirut today is so substantial that the entire district of downtown is commonly referred to as Solidere, conflating the very fabric of the city with the private-public company responsible for its redevelopment.

The beginning of Solidere’s proposal involved large-scale demolition of what remained of downtown, even those buildings that could have been restored, regardless of whether the buildings were being occupied or not14. The company’s marketing strategy draws from an image of Beirut from its ancient Phoenician past, projecting a decontextualized history onto an envisioned future of a capitalistic global city.

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“Just as the causes of urban destruction are multiple and varied, the forms of reconstruction everywhere reflect a battle over the control of the direction of the urban body politic. As global capital, accompanied by neo-liberal policies and privatization, extends its reach, a critical question is whether struggles for humanitarian principles can find expression in rebuilding.”

— Ida Susser and Jane Schneider, Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World

Solidere’s motto, “Beirut: Ancient City of the Future” speaks directly to the company’s desire to manipulate time, and in bringing an artificially remembered history directly up to speed with a projected future, this marketing strategy effectively skips over and erases the war, absolving the company’s responsibility (as a government sanctioned developer) to adequately address the problems of those displaced during the years of conflict.

This willingness to forget certain histories in favor of others is apparent in what little preservation laws exist in Lebanon today. Lebanese conservation law categorizes antiques as “those human products that belong to whatever civilization prior to the year 1700.” Contemporary trends in preservation and historicism favor styles from the French Mandate or Ottoman period, with no desire to preserve or emulate the architecture of the 50s and 60s, much of which served as the architectural style used to construct the young republic’s post-colonial identity15.

The focus of this study falls upon Beirut’s city center because it was the site of the largest reconstruction effort post-war, and offers a clear framework for understanding resistance narratives in an extremely capitalistic area of development16.

By artificially selecting memories city

planners and developers are denying collective memory and healing in favor of producing a new global capital that references an imagined time of economic prosperity, referencing this illusive and lost “Golden Age.” None of the buildings in this case study are under any official type of conservation protection, rather, their continued existence is the byproduct of general disputes surrounding ownership paired with large scale disinvestment.

11. Sawalha, 271.

12. Sawalha, 272.

13. Sawalha, 276.

14. Judith Naeff, Precarious Imaginaries of Beirut: A City’s Suspended Now (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 25.

15. Fares el-Dahdah, “On Solidere’s Motto, ‘Beirut: ancient city of the future’,” in Projecting Beirut: episodes in the construction and reconstruction of a modern city, ed. Peter Rowe and Hashim Sarkis (Munich: Prestel, 1998), 73.

16. Maha Yahya, “Let the Dead be Dead: Communal Imaginaries and national Narratives in the Post-Civil War Reconstruction of Beirut.” in Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City, ed. Alev Cinar and Thomas Bender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 236-265.

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Globalization, Resistance, and Memory

What does it mean for architecture to have an active role in collective memory making in the face of globalization?

Globalization can be defined as the current dominant mode of operation, categorized by cultural, informational, and commodity flows paired with neo-liberal finance-driven forms of corporate capitalism that subordinate competing institutions, including nation states, to a ‘new world order’. Cities that are not major hubs of global capital like New York or London are still subject to pressures from the institutions of global capitalism to deregulate markets, privatize services like waterworks and electricity, and cut government funding for health, education, and welfare.

As global capital extends its reach, a critical question is whether struggles for humanitarian principles can find expression in rebuilding17. Architecture as a discipline operates at the intersection of power, relations of production, culture, and representation and is therefore key in the construction of hegemony and everyday life18. If the built environment mediates lived experience and institutional power, so too does it mediate memory, both personal and political.

Scholars have suggested that personal memories of a traumatic event require belated processing, and that an interest in public monuments and other forms of commemoration tend to arise only after a generational lapse of time (about fifteen or more years)19. A politicized control over memory making, critical in nation building and uniting a divided population post-war, involves generalizing a lived experience in order to pass it on to later generations.

This constructed memory relies not only on symbolic representations like monuments 25

or the commemorative naming of public space, but also on educational institutions like libraries, museums, and of course schooling. In this way, an implicit lived experience that loses its form via personal retelling becomes an explicitly defined and stabilized narrative20. Part of what exacerbates Lebanon’s trauma is not only continuous instances of violence and political turmoil, but also this lack of reliable collective memory. As I have outlined with Solidere’s reconstruction strategy, that of a state sanctioned amnesia, to ‘forgive and forget’ has proven futile. With an agreed forgetting, the victims and the perpetrators of violence are no longer held together by a mutual obligation.

There must be a shift from mutual forgetting to shared remembering. To engage in a collective memory is to acknowledge the existence of a collective identity in the first place.

This shared remembering is perhaps best embodied in the abandoned structures of Beirut. In the words of Cathy Caruth, “The story of trauma, then, as the narrative of a belated experience, far from telling of an escape from reality—the escape from a death, or from its referential force—rather attests to its endless impact on a life” (7).

Therefore, despite efforts to forget, the trauma of Lebanon’s conflicts are repeatedly experienced in the city’s urban fabric.

I argue that these physical remnants of war serve as a pedagogical tool used to constitute collective memory in the place of institutional failure on the part of the government, private sector, and education systems. The existence of these abandoned decaying structures provides a lens through which to process and understand Beirut’s precarity, both past and present.

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“Through the notion of trauma we can understand that a rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not.”

—Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History

17. Ida Susser and Jane Schneider, “Introduction,” in Wounded Cities: Destruction And Reconstruction In a Globalized World, ed. Susser and Schneider (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 3.

18. Thomas Dutton and Lian Hurst Mann, “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Architecture’s Social Project,” in Reconstructing Architecture: Critical Discourses and Social Practices, ed. Dutton and Mann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1.

“Pity the nation divided into fragments, Each fragment deeming itself a nation.”

19. Aleida Assmann, “Memory, Individual and Collective,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, ed. Robert Goodin and Charles Tilly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 5.

-Kahlil Gibran, The Garden of The Prophet

20. Assmann, 10.

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Unresolved Trauma: The Holiday Inn

As set forth by Naeff, the narrative of Unresolved Trauma is a temporality that contributes to Beirut’s mental and physical state of unrest. The most significant contribution to this state is the fact that political figures largely responsible for the conflict of the Civil War remain in power today, and that General Amnesty was granted per the Taif Agreement of 1989.

This governmental effort to ‘move on’ is countered by the continued existence of massive structures existing alongside the luxury highrises that try to portray economic prosperity as a means of recovery, namely the Holiday Inn. The Holiday Inn’s value as a symbolic structure is myriad. Its beginning as the ultimate glamorous tourist destination and cultural center for Beirut’s elite was short lived, as the hotel was only open for two years before becoming a critical vantage point for militias seeking to control the demarcation line between East and West Beirut. The building became a central figure in the Battle of the Hotels21 and today is remembered largely as an active site of violence. However, this recent memory of the war, made irrefutable by the scarification and damage inflicted upon the building, is compounded by both the memory of prewar glamour and an imagination of future glamour yet to be realized.

The facade of the building has been used recently as advertising space.

Providing an image almost too ironic to be real, a massive advertisement for luxury housing hangs from the bullet-ridden face 31

of the hotel, literally masking the trauma of war with projections of wealth. While unresolved trauma can be understood within the narratives of all three abandoned structures, the Holiday Inn’s symbolic value tied to both a nostalgic time of peace and prosperity, as well as the war, make the structure as it stands today a prime example of Lebanon’s perpetual state of tumult.

When Beiruti’s experience the building, they are simultaneously faced with this dual memory. Today, shareholders are locked in a dispute over the fate of the structure. At some point there were talks of renovating the building and creating luxury lofts by Lebanese developers, but Kuwaiti owners wished to demolish the hotel and start anew. Ultimately, neither group has reached an agreement, and the building was supposedly put up for auction in 2014 but has not yet changed ownership, locking the hotel’s future in a stalemate. The problem, unsurprisingly, remains unresolved.

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Imminent Apocalypse: The Burj Al Murr

The Burj Al Murr, like the Holiday Inn, was a critical site during the Battle of the Hotels due to the vantage points the tower’s height provided over the downtown district and militarized ‘green zone.’ The 40-storey tower, originally intended to become the Trade Center of Lebanon, was just one year into construction when fighting began in 1975. The concrete frame is notoriously robust. While the Holiday Inn sustains remarkable and iconic physical damage, the Burj Al Murr stands eerily intact. It is rumoured that despite desires to demolish the building, it would be too costly and difficult to topple the immense concrete structure. Thus, the building looms over the city with an air of immortality.

Both the Holiday Inn and the Burj Al Murr remain closed to the public, and have been used recently as military bases for the Lebanese army. This current military

presence, the fact that the Burj Al Murr never realized its original intended use, and the building’s aura of haunting permanence makes this structure emblematic of yet another chronotope defined by Naef—that of imminent apocalypse.

Imagining the apocalypse is a phenomena deeply rooted in the lore of Abrahamic religions and has been used as a coping mechanism since the beginning of human history. In the words of theorist Stephen O’Leary, “Apocalypticism has been accepted widely during periods when substantial numbers of people were dissatisfied deeply with their present and faced an uncertain future” again, pointing to a current state of precarity as a necessary condition for apocalyptic imagining.

Perhaps what remains so enticing about the apocalypse is the resolve it offers, a divine reckoning of sorts. The end of all times necessarily is accompanied by a final punishment of evil22. It can be said that imagining this type of final resolve, albeit dark, is easier than attempting to project a current state of unease forever into the future.

Therefore, the Burj Al Murr’s presence prompts those around it to question the current state of affairs, as in the political and economic semblance of normalcy, and how long things can appear to stay afloat before ultimately collapsing. Imagining the imminent apocalypse is another form of seeking resolve, and provides those longing to escape perpetual calamity a method of envisioning a future.

Mythical Rebirth: The Egg

The Egg stands out among these three abandoned structures in many ways.

Even it’s dome-like form makes it alien opposed to the rigid, orthogonal lines of the towers mentioned previously. The Egg, formally known as the Metropole Cinema, was built in 1965 as part of the ‘Beirut City Center’ complex, which envisioned the egg alongside two massive modernist towers to serve as a cultural and shopping center. But when the war broke out in 1975, only one tower had been completed, and now both the tower and half of the egg structure have been demolished. The Egg now is a decaying structure displaying the mark of war. The pockmarked surface of the concrete dome resembles that of an asteroid; it is as if a paint-strewn object from outer space landed smack in the center of Beirut’s most expensive neighborhood.

The narrative of mythical rebirth is embodied clearly in the Egg, not only in the prophetic naming of the structure, but mostly in the reclamation of the space by the Lebanese public during the Fall Revolution of 2019. The ‘Sowra’, still ongoing, calls for the resignation of corrupt political leaders, a condemnation of sectarian rule, and expresses overall exasperation over the current state of unemployment and economic crisis. The Egg played such a critical role as a gathering space, used to host lectures and rallies, screen movies, and host art exhibitions, that the movement has been dubbed by some as the ‘Eggupation’.

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“We are tired of the corruption, lies, and constant idleness of our leaders. If they don’t want to give us our own spaces, then we will take them ourselves. The occupation of the Egg symbolized the revolution itself: if they don’t want to act, then we will.”

-Rania Khoury, Al Monitor23 One of the direct results of the Fall Revolution was a newfound appreciation for public urban space, and notably, walking. My friend Tamara told me that in all of her years living in Beirut she had never truly walked anywhere, opting instead to endure gridlock traffic in the private bubble of her car. With driving made impossible by roadblocks, Beirutis took advantage of the open streets and truly began to explore downtown by foot. This newfound appreciation for public urban space and the peaceful reclamation of the Egg and the space of Beirut’s streets, marks, hopefully, a rebirth for Beirut in the midst of capitalistic takeover.

21. Dalia Chabarek, “Memories of war in the divided city,” openDemocracy, April 18, 2013, https://www. opendemocracy.net/en/opensecurity/memories-of-warin-divided-city/.

22. Stephen O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A theory of Millennial Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 6.

23. Euan Ward, “‘Eggupation’ breeds revolutionary thinking in Beirut,” Al-Monitor, November 8, 2019, https:// www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/11/lebaneseprotesters-eggupy-old-cinema.html

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In Conclusion...

The purpose of this thesis is not to propose new design strategies, modes of retrofitting, or even advocate for the active preservation of Beirut’s abandoned structures. Rather, I argue for their implicit value as pedagogical tools capable of providing Beirut with forms of collective memory making in the absence of an institutional effort to remediate conflict.

Beirut and Lebanon as a whole today exist in a continuous state of decay. At the time of writing, the country has plunged into economic freefall, and protests rage on throughout the city despite the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic. The phrase “Who is More Powerful, Hunger or the Sect?” still rests heavy on the consciousness of the city, as the latest battle cry to emerge is “We do not fear the virus, We fear hunger.”

This is the reality Beirut faces. Yet despite generations of inherited chaos, and no matter how bleak the situation may be, the Lebanese continue to create art, partake in rich cultural traditions, and generate informal means of resistance in the face of extreme corruption.

The abandoned structures of Beirut, upon closer examination, retain critical roles in the healing, recovery, and empowerment of a war torn society. Even in their state of utter decay their symbolic meaning is enough to spark critical conversations about public space, ownership, and the identity of Beirut as a whole. Symbolically, these structures already belong to a network of resistance spaces within the Solidere neighborhood. This chunk of downtown Beirut was the most decimated by war and the subsequent reconstruction, and retains the highest property value in the city today.

Yet many of Beirut’s “resistive spaces,” meaning free libraries, art spaces, and 37

reclaimed public urban space, fall within the boundaries of the Solidere master plan.

Beirut is a difficult city to navigate without the added benefit of a familial network.

So much of the city’s urban interaction is dependent on family affiliations. This, paired with a stark lack of public space, means that experiencing the city of Beirut often requires consumption. The small network of nonprofits that support free art residencies, host festivals and cultural events, and provide much needed gathering space for disparate communities otherwise segregated by class, race, or religion.

Chief among these spaces is a place called Mansion. There is a conservation law that forbids the official demolition of the french-mandate period mansions scattered throughout downtown Beirut.

However, there is no law saying anything about actually upkeeping the property. As a direct consequence, property developers have snapped up the lucrative lots and are simply waiting for the buildings to collapse on their own. Mansion exists because a group of artists decided to squat in one of these decaying houses, and reached an agreement with the owner that if they did nothing to intentionally improve the state of the structure they could inhabit the building rent free. The space now houses artist studios, a kitchen, a library, and a salon that is completely unequivocally open to the public. There are no ties to a charity or governmental non-profit, and is therefore the ultimate example of a resistive space. Central to the project’s beauty is its temporality-- Mansion, as a collective and a building, must ultimately come to an end.

The space exists only because the building is dying.

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In decay there is life. Perhaps more life, as I’ve argued here, than in the ultraglam but empty real estate boons designed for Gulf Arab elites. These abandoned structures function, both physically and symbolically, within this network of resistive spaces in Solidere.

The Egg has already shown its capacity for becoming a cultural hub—the people host lectures, screen movies, and create art under the free space of the dome. The Burj Al Murr has also been semi-retrofitted for inhabitation, the bottom storeys occupied by military operations. What capacity does the building hold besides being a symbol of death? What would opening this structure once again to the people result in? Fear of a return to violence marks an inherent lingering distrust not only

between the government and the people but also between ethno-religious groups as well. And the question of The Holiday Inn? Perhaps it is enough to let it stand rebelliously next to the neighboring ultra glam highrise developments as a visceral reminder that there is much to be done, that things are not over. Maybe there is no recovery here. Let it fall, crumble in on itself.

Who will die first? Will there be a Beirut to witness the collapse?

Within these buildings, the lives that they’ve lived and the deaths they remember, lies a rich history and capacity for storytelling as a way to remember and heal. Telling a story, at the end of it all, is what the Lebanese do best.

Bibliography

Andraos, Amale, Nora Akawi, and Caitlin Blanchfield. The Arab City : Architecture and Representation. New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City,

Columbia University Press, 2017.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Chabarek, Dalia. “Memories of war in the divided city,” openDemocracy, April 18, 2013, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opensecurity/memories-of-war-in-divided city/.

Dutton, Thomas and Lian Hurst mann. Reconstructing Architecture: Critical Discourses and

Social Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Eisenberg, Laura. “Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?: Israel and Lebanon after the Withdrawal.” Middle East Review of International Affairs 4, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 17-31. 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

Peter Rowe and Hashim Sarkis. Munich: Prestel, 1998.

Naeff, Judith. Precarious Imaginaries of Beirut : a City’s Suspended Now. Cham, Switzerland:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Nayel, Moe-Ali. “Beirut’s bullet-riddled Holiday Inn - a history of cities in 50 buildings, day 28,” The Guardian, May 1, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/01/ beirut-holiday-inn-civil-war-history-cities-50-buildings O’Leary, Stephen. Arguing the Apocalypse: A theory of Millennial Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1998.

Rowe, Peter G., and Hashim Sarkis. Projecting Beirut: Episodes In the Construction and

Reconstruction of a Modern City. Munich: Prestel, 1998.

Sawalha, Aseel. “‘Healing the Wounds of the War’: Placing the War-displaced in Postwar

Beirut,” in Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction In a Globalized World,

edited by Isa Susser and Jane Schneider. Oxford: Berg, 2003.

Susser, Ida and Jane Schneider. Wounded Cities: Destruction And Reconstruction In a

Globalized World. Oxford: Berg, 2003.

Volk, Lucia. Memorials and Martyrs in Modern Lebanon. Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 2010.

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Special Thanks To...

My phenomenal advisors Sophie Hochhausl and Heather Sharkey, who provided invaluable guidance whilst withstanding my chaotic working methods.

Guest critics Nimrod Ben-Zeev and Davy Knittle, who generously guided me through the beginning outlining phase of this thesis and continued to provide resources and thoughtful additions right up until the end.

And finally my family and friends in Beirut, LĂŠa, Sarah, Tima, Tamara, and Sylvie, without whom this project would have never come together.

About the Author Lee Onbargi graduated in 2020 from The University of Pennsylvania with a major in Architecture and a minor in Cinema and Media Studies. They are currently obsessed with cities, learning more about how urban systems operate, and investigating questions of public access in our current neo-liberal landscape.

Their identity as a first generation American has shaped much of their course of study, especially their inquiry into Lebanon, a country their father left during the Civil War. Throughout their time at Penn, Lee has produced videos, podcasts, models, installation works, and countless drawings to further explore the intersections of space, memory, gender, and design. Their work has been featured at the Weitzman School of Design and they are a 2020 recipient of the Rose Undergraduate Research Award.