The Green Line of Beirut: Urban Study and Architectural Interventions

Phase I: Urban Analysis

Tutors: Elie Haddad & Alicia Denris + visiting critics: Evan Chakroff and Nancy Hilal

click on title to view analysis

Morphological and Historical Study

The Image of the City - Chiyah

Phase II: Student Projects

Tutors: Elie Haddad & Tarek Zeidan + visiting critics: Helena Casanova & Jesus Hernandez

Crossing the Lines: Architecture and the Politics of Integration
Elie Haddad / Tarek Zeidan

Every historical city, and every district within a historical city, possesses particular characteristics that grew with it naturally, or were imposed on it in the process of its formation by political, economic, and social forces. In Beirut, the district of Chiah-Ain El Remmaneh symbolizes in a very sharp way this idea, as the whole district, in its continuous mutations, reflects the constant changes that have affected the area over the last century, and more acutely in the last four decades, i.e. with the beginning of the Civil War [1975-1990].

This zone of the city, which was until the beginning of the Twentieth century a largely agricultural land filled with orchards, gradually dissolved into an urbanized extension of the city, which lacked nevertheless some of the important elements of urbanization: proper infrastructure, public parks, public spaces, etc. The remnants of the agricultural past are still visible in some of the small-scale alleys that constituted small roads between different plantations, as well as in some of the typical agricultural houses that dotted the landscape.

It is well-known of course that this particular ‘suburb’ of the city, was the point of contact between two distinct communities, very similar at the social level, yet different in their ideological and confessional make-up. It is for this reason perhaps, that the first spark of the civil war was ignited in this particular zone of the city. What followed was a long period of intermittent wars, which froze certain parts while allowing growth in others, coupled with severe destructions along the dividing ‘green line’. Following the end of the war and the return of order, a booming real-estate market at the beginning of the new century led to a wave of uncontrolled growth that now threatens to dislocate certain people and change the character and morphology of the different neighborhoods. What was very interesting to discover, and disturbing as well, during the field study conducted by students in this studio was the level of fear of the ‘other’ that still persists in the collective memory, albeit at different levels. It was also quite clear that on one side of the Green Line, a certain paramilitary presence was felt, despite the appearance of normalcy, while on the other, a certain feeling of abandonment or withdrawal from the public sphere was more pronounced. The Green Line in fact, still operates as some kind of psychological barrier, invisible but present, between two different worlds.

While architects most of the time long for an ‘ideal’ state of order and harmony, it was not really in our intentions to pretend that certain urban interventions would necessarily change the socio-political condition that had developed over decades. Yet, following the social and urban analysis of the zone, most of the students in this studio chose to propose ‘idealistic’ projects that would attempt to bridge the ‘invisible gap’ between the two areas, while some were more content to propose interventions that filled a realistic need within one of the two main neighborhoods. The result of this studio was an assemblage of different proposals, which, in the unfortunate condition of urbanism in Beirut, would remain on paper. In other countries, some of these proposals may well catch the interest of the local population, and may lead in some cases to serious efforts at realizing some of them.

However, the important lesson that we continue to project through this final year studio at our school, is that architectural projects, in and of themselves, without a deep grounding in the socio-political reality of a certain time and place, and without an understanding of the morphological transformations within a certain zone, remain an individual expression at best, and a superficial one in most cases. The importance of architecture is fundamentally linked to its embodiment in the ‘corpus’ of the city, and consequently in its natural attempt at resolving some of the inherent contradictions that exist within its urban fabric. The current transformation of the city is a grave reminder that the dissolution of the urban fabric can only lead to the aggravation of the social and political problems, and not, as the great advertisements covering new construction sites seem to pretend, to lead us to a ‘paradise on earth’.