Transformative Reconstruction

Abstract

The conflictual past of Beirut is being erased by the company of Solidere, which has a strong will to modernise, through a highly destructive reconstruction, in an effort to heal the city. With this project, a new approach is taken on, in which an old concrete structure, riddled with bullet holes, part of the great variety of dilapidated and unfinished buildings that have characterized Beirut’s urban landscape for decades, is to be transformed and provided continuity. The structure in question dates back to the Lebanese Civil War, and was most likely built for its strategic position, just south of the city center, and it has been occupied ever since by the Lebanese military. In this project the structure will be transformed and completely redefined by the method of ‘creating by removing’. The rough edges, resulting from the cutting process and the existing scars marking the structure’s history, are proliferated in the transformation process as traces to preserve. The new intervention, housed in autonomous structures, will inhabit the existing concrete skeleton, and will absorb the program of a military first aid clinic, responding to the state of urgency Lebanon is currently in. A great contrast arises between the rough edges and exposed aggregate, with the sterile and seamless surfaces of the new intervention. The collision of both, grants an entirely new meaning to the neglected structure and its traumatic past, as it becomes the carrier of something prospective. Subsequently, in order to have the project further reflect on the status quo of Beirut’s built environment, it aims, through the transformation process, to attain a state of latency, in between demolition and construction, and in between a ruin and a building. The final result proposes a scenario which is neither stable, nor unstable, it simply exists in the inbetween.