Rami Abou-Khalil260049755Final Thesis Description

We Can

Go East,

But Not

Too Far.

A New Ruin, And Its Festival, for BeirutOn the architectural abuse of Panopticism, the reuse of modernism, the disintegration of hysteri-

cal objects and the integration of a festival in Beirut.

Burj

The site of the intervention is a tower named Burj el-Murr. It was built in 1974 and owned by members of the el-Murr family, a prominent political clan. The tower was left unfinished when the war halted construction, and despite many dermatological renovations and designs has never been more than a concrete artifact. Originally meant to be an office tower, it was only ever used as a sniper outpost, becoming a major actor in one of the most horrific chapters of the civil war. 36 stories of office space were meant to rise from a two story slab of clubs, retail and a cinema, as welll as underground parking (Naamani). The tower was structurally ambitious, relying on a hollow-tube concrete structure, where all the facades are load bearing and are braced in the long direction by shear walls that enclose the core of the building. The tower always seemed to gravitate towards its present state of finished incompleteness. This project de-cides to further prolong this finished/incomplete state by grafting itself into the tower in a way that maintains its proportions, does not require the addition of prominent auxiliary buildings, or even the addition of windows or glazing, which would compromise the ruined quality of the tower, and by creating a program that will further sustain and celebrate this ruin quality. The structural organization of the building, in three parts, is used to orga-nize the procession and to rationalize the transformations to the building.

Archival Images from 1974, showing guerilla fighters in the tower, and war damages

Panopticism

Architecture in Beirut hasn’t yet normalized the terrors created by panopticism. The overwhelming collective amnesia that has characterized the post-war era in Lebanon is transcended by one fear: Acrophobia. Almost all of the towers that became iconic of a Foucaldian sniper war (Burj-el Murr being a prominent figure, but also the Holiday Inn tower, Burj Rizk…) have resisted reconstruction, and are still empty shells. In “Yalo”; Elias Khoury’s postwar novel about a young Guerilla fighter, Yalo is unable to let go of panoptic power. He reenacts his sniper days by surprising visitors in the woods with a flashlight.Burj el-Murr is probably the most notorious of the sniper towers, and was a crucial player in the most horrific parts of the civil war. It is crucial to reconcile Beirut’s architecture with panopticism, and transform it into a positive creator of public consciousness towards the city. The project does this by transforming the building into a ‘Beirutorama’ of sorts, merging the civic experience of theaters and concerts with the almost military experi-ence of observing the city.

Cranes, Balloons, and Ruins:

In order to adequately resolve and respond to this seemingly generalized acrophobia, The program takes root in two events: The first is the story of the Beirut hot air balloon, and the second is crowd behavior during the Bei-rut Spring. Far from being precedents in the traditional architectural sense, these events inform the problematic of panopticism in Beirut.Hashim Sarkis’ Hot Air Balloon was a strategic proposal to democratize panopticism and reconcile the Leba-nese psyche with verticality, but it is precisely this democratization of panoptic gaze that rendered it vulnerable. A few weeks before the Hariri assassination, a yellow hot air balloon was set up, a stone’s throw away from the tower., that gave the Lebanese a rare opportunity at getting a bird’s eye view of their capital. The balloon’s launch pad was designed by Hashim Sarkis, the Aga Khan professor of architecture at the Harvard GSD. When the Hariri Assassination happened, the balloon was automatically moved to a location far from the blast site, and in the tense security climate that ensued, the balloon had to stop functioning. Its panoptic properties meant it was too problematic, since it was offering the Lebanese to be prime witnesses of major political events for the mere fee of ten dollars. Another consequence of the Hariri assassination is the Beirut spring. The only image that managed to capture the scale of that event was taken by an adventurous photographer from a crane. The image captured the spirit of the Protest, but also pointed out the lack of accessible lookout points from which to observe it: no one had experienced the revolution from above. Since one of the goals of the thesis is to maintain the iconic, ruin-like quality of the tower, another study that has informed the program was the analysis of the link between festivals and ruins, and of their cultural, political and spatial contexts. As a result of those investigations, the program consists of a plaza, a garden, a philharmonic concert hall, an extension to the Conservatoire providing extra rehearsal spaces, that form the base of the tower, and connect it to the city. Within the tower, which would mainly operate in the summer in the context of a ‘festival’ is a series of VIP lounges, a Restaurant bar with a terrace, and an outdoors performance space.

Fantastic Technology and the Skyscraper

In Delirious New York, Koolhaas theorizes the corbusian skyscraper, from which Burj el Murr traces its lin-eage, as a ‘naked’ building, but Le Corbusier’s ‘honest’ skyscraper comes at the very high cost of total banality. This project attempts to return the modernist skyscraper to its pre-Corbusian state: Infinite fields of possibili-ties, architectural lobotomy, etc. Technology itself is not fantastic. It has to be used as ‘an instrument and exten-sion of the imagination’. While being fiercely anticorbusian as an idea, it is to be one of the crucial components of this project; not the myth of technology, but technology at the service of Myth. After being welcomed by the ground floor lobby, above which hover private VIP lounges, and the going through the dark, tall, piranesian core of the building, visitors have to take elevators up to the 35th floor bar, and/or their seats. In this part of the building, the dense stacking of floor plates has disappeared, and made way for four glass elevators that allow them to experience the inside of the building in a radically different way. First, they are different from the elevators originally planned in this, and many other, office buildings in that it is not tucked deep inside the building, but pushed against its edges. The hope is that the generated experience is also radically different from ‘atrium’ elevators, since the void references only itself. The second potent way in which technology is used to generate architectural mythology is the technological processing of the outdoor concert/theater experience. In an inversion of the traditional sequence of the unveiling of the performance, it is the stage that permanently cantilevered off the ‘neck’ of the tower (this is a ‘headless’ tower), exposed to the city, but hidden from the public. The public, in turn, inhabits a 12-storey high mobile sec-tion of the building-nicknamed The Mobile- that comprises the seating areas framed by two lobbies (connected to the static lobby), and two bars (connecting to the terrace and restaurant/bar). In the ‘closed’ position, the lobby connects to the top of the Mobile, and the bar and restaurant errace spills into it. When the show is about to begins, the audience gathers in the bar, lobby or take their seat in the mobile, which then proceeds to rise and leave the neck of the building, vertiginously elevating the audience above the stage and the city. In this case, a simple lift bridge pulley/counterweight system is used to propel the audience into the air, and directly confronts the ‘acrophobia’ that this thesis diagnoses and addresses. The audience transgresses the ‘sniper’ experience they have been put in while they were inside the building’s protective concrete shell, and become completely vulner-able to the city’s gaze.

Archeology:

Solidere’s Motto for Beirut was ‘The Ancient City of the Future’. After Solidere’s early Masterplan, a utopian/hypermodernist tabula rasa scheme, was met with scepticism from developers and tourists alike, Solidere turned to historical legitimization as a way to create a backdrop to redevelopment. Beirut was not going to be built, it was going to be rebuilt, hystericaly and historically restored to an impeccable state of detailing. Monuments were selected from a plethora of deemed archeological sites from different eras, to be preserved and rebuilt.One crucial era was forgotten in this renovation frenzy; and that is modernism, specially the kind of pure laine modernist fragments of the city, such as Burj-el-Murr. Far from embracing the archeological monumentalization of the city’s remaining landmarks, this project will question the nature of the archeologically charged object by playing with the extent to which this landmark is transformed. Turning the tower into a ruin, and programming it as such is an ironic and slightly tongue-in-cheek scenario, as buildings of the modernist lineage are on their death bed in Solidere. The strategic destruction of parts of the building (radical in the new ‘hall of elevators’, partial in the vip lounge areas, the preservation of main structural components of the buildings, mainly the façade and shear walls) might hint at solidere’s aggres-sive modus operandi, but is in fact used to ‘preserve’ the building’s iconic shell.

Novel & Myth

Lebanese artists and architects have only conservatively embraced the war as subject matter. References to the war often appear in the plastic arts in a literal and direct way, e.g. material for sculpture such as shrapnel and barbed wire… Postwar filmmakers and photographers also seem to have tried to crystallize the war with images, and, if we exclude a few remarkable artists such as Akram Zaatari or Walid Raad, most of them treat the war with the same kind of dermatological obsession with the photogeneity of the destructed surface of the city and of the body. Architects are just as susceptible of this superficiality, and have not yet reminded the Lebanese that this war, eternalized in images, happened on their streets. Out of this postwar amnesia and superficiality, I would argue that two actors emerge and resist the comfort of this vacuum. On the one hand is the failure of the Lebanese economy to jumpstart reconstruction. The down-town core, left hysterically empty by overambitious market speculation and unadventurous developers, does stand as a reminder of the ‘scares and scars’ of the war. On the other hand are a handful of authors who have integrated the war in their novels and have managed to address its traumas, absurdities and spaces in a poignant but democratic way. Authors such as Rashid el-Daif, Hoda Barakat, Hassan Daoud or Elias Khoury have given the novel ‘new forms and imbued it with unusual traits in order for it to be able to capture the unusual historic and spatial attributes of a city at war with itself’ (Sarkis, 2001). The postwar novel managed to successfully narrate the war by framing it within the myth of Beirut’s cyclical destruction.Novels have already done what memorials and Architecture were expected to do. As a result, Beirut does not need memorials. Now, Architecture needs to go beyond the memorial and needs to internalize the traumas of wars not by absolving its people of the burden of remembrance but by integrating the war’s magical/hyper real-ism into its syntax. We need to start looking at patterns of difference in the way that the Lebanese have inhab-ited the city during war as a way to propose a revolutionary architecture that addresses its mythology.

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