The rush to rebirth

Beirut

Only a decade ago, it was impossible to think about this city without pain. Once known for its aura of sophistication, Beirut had been torn apart by Lebanon’s calamitous 15-year civil war. Many of its streets were in ruins. The twinkling shoreline had become an enormous garbage dump, its scent wafting over the capital with the afternoon sea breeze.

But if this city’s surviving inhabitants have yet to fully recover from the psychic damage the war caused, the rapid pace of its physical reconstruction has since transformed it into one of the world’s most fascinating urban experiments. Its colonial-era core has finally been reopened after a decade-long restoration effort. A long list of architectural luminaries -- from the New York-based Steven Holl to the Paris-based Jean Nouvel -- have recently been given major commissions here. Even the garbage dump has been bulldozed; it will form a landfill for a new 150-acre development, including a marina, high-end housing and a seafront park.

The importance of these moves extends far beyond issues of urban planning. They are the basis of a vision rarely seen today: a city of often contradictory values that nonetheless retains a sense of cultural wholeness. Together, these projects promise to revive some of Beirut’s former glamour. They are also reminders that conflict can be a creative tool, one that expresses the richness of metropolitan life.

The center of the new Beirut is a roughly 100-acre development at its historic core. This was once a section of the green line -- the battle-scarred strip that divided east and west, Christian and Muslim. During the civil war, which began in 1975 and lasted until 1990, the area’s streets were barricaded with abandoned cars and sheets of corrugated metal; snipers pockmarked the buildings’ facades with machine-gun fire or blasted them apart with rocket-propelled grenades. It was also a death zone: More than 100,000 people were killed in Beirut during the war. The city’s scars were evidence of an enduring contempt for human life.

Today, many of the old buildings have been restored, and the area has the sterile, well-scrubbed feel of fresh construction. A quaint limestone-clad clock tower anchors the district’s central plaza, dubbed Place de l’Etoile. From there, a series of pedestrian streets radiate outward. A main axis runs north along Rue Allenby, which extends down toward the site of the future waterfront development.

The development was begun in the early 1990s by Solidere, a mammoth public-private partnership spearheaded by then-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was already a billionaire businessman when he was appointed to lead the country in 1992.

It is a fairly accurate reconstruction of an existing neighborhood whose roots lie in the ideas that reshaped Paris during the mid- and late 19th century.

Where Paris’ vast plazas and boulevards were designed to reflect its place as a center of imperial power, however, Beirut’s version is more intimate. Its structures evoke the lazy sensuality of a seaside city. Instead of Paris’ boulevards, one finds narrow cobblestone thoroughfares.

The semicircular arches of the porticos that flank the French capital’s Rue de Rivoli have a platonic order; here, the arches are more elongated, a gentle nod to traditional Arab architecture.

But the real precedents are not Parisian but American: the shopping arcades of Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace and San Francisco’s revamped Ghirardelli Square.

Like these earlier developments, the Solidere project is fundamentally about consumption. Its covered sidewalks are lined with the kind of homogenous, high-end boutiques that cater primarily to affluent tourists. Its second- and third-floor offices -- now mostly vacant -- are meant to attract the global business set.

A sanitized past

The sense of a sanitized past is also visible in subtle changes in the articulation of the architecture. Most of the restored buildings are made of a soft local limestone. Traditionally, such surfaces were covered in colored plaster to protect the stone from wear. Here, the stone facades have been left bare. Their surfaces have a rough, chiseled quality. The idea is to create a feeling of authenticity more real than the real -- a denial of the past.

It is this sanitized version of history that troubles many in the city’s cultural and academic communities. Bernard Khoury, a 35-year-old Lebanese architect who has become a vocal critic of Solidere, sees the result as part of a calculated agenda.

“It is about turning Beirut into a sort of postcard,” he says. “What they want is something safe and romantic, like Switzerland in the Middle East. But the real social issues are still buried.”

Still, the Solidere development represents only one view of the city, even if it is currently the most prominent. Less than a mile away, the once-glamorous corniche traces a languorous path along the Mediterranean’s edge. In the 1950s, a number of elegant hotels and apartment buildings were built here. Many of the hotels are now abandoned, yet even in their decrepit state, their modern, streamlined forms evoke a city of incredible visual richness.

The hotels overlook a pedestrian promenade that is among the most layered social spaces anywhere in the Middle East. Many of the city’s inhabitants mix here, from young women in jangling jewelry and miniskirts to others clad in traditional burkas to men smoking water pipes. Just below, the rocky shoreline is divided into a series of discrete public and private zones. Underground tunnels connect many of the old hotels to private beach clubs; lounge chairs are arranged in neat rows along massive concrete piers.

This is where another aspect of Beirut’s architectural conflict is being played out. The corniche’s Phoenician Hotel, designed by the American architect Edward Durell Stone in the late 1950s, was a classic of postwar modernity. Its sleek modern lines have since been redone in a grotesque pseudo-classical style.

Just across the street, the elegant shopping structure La Maison de l’artisan, fronted by splayed columns that suggest concrete palm trees, has been redecorated like a wedding cake; its interiors are now unrecognizable. Next door, another hotel, the 1930s St. George, is covered in scaffolding. The hotel was being restored when money dried up.

Meanwhile, other parts of the corniche are being reclaimed by the young architects, writers and designers who make up the city’s growing cultural scene. The attraction, in part, stems from the area’s blend of ‘50s chic and a tough, industrial ethos. Mostly in their 30s and 40s, the members of this new generation grew up in a fully modern world. They understand that the hard edges of urban life are a fundamental part of its beauty -- evoking another kind of truth, a city stripped of delusional fantasies.

Raising awareness

These conflicting views of the city -- and the often-heated debates they have sparked -- have helped raise the level of architectural awareness. In doing so, they have also raised hopes about the city’s future.

Two years ago, for example, Solidere set out on a search for major international talent for a new wave of development. The effort reflected a popular, sometimes cynical, strategy among developers worldwide: The prestige such architects lend a project can help pave the way for large-scale development, especially in a tough political environment.

Yet Beirut has been particularly fortunate in its choices. Of the various foreigners who have secured major commissions during the last few years, most have sought to reach beyond conventional stereotypes about the Middle East. The best have shown a deep understanding of local context, both social and psychological.

Of these, Nouvel is perhaps the most intriguing. The architect built his reputation on high-tech projects such as Paris’ Institut du Monde Arabe. Completed in 1987, its famous facade -- a grid of mechanical oculi that adjust to the level of sunlight like camera lenses -- blends the geometric complexity of Islamic art with the cool rationality of the French enlightenment.

In Beirut, though, Nouvel’s design for a new housing and shopping complex is an attempt to reach beyond surfaces into a deeper reading of local social norms. Scheduled to break ground in late 2004 just south of the Solidere development, the complex will be dominated by a slender 36-story residential and hotel tower. A lower retail and residential structure, pierced by a narrow pedestrian street, will extend along the tower’s base.

The tower is conceived as a solid concrete mass with a series of deep voids carved out of its surfaces. The voids -- of various sizes and shapes -- will house terraces, gardens and outdoor pools. At the tower’s upper levels, more pools will project from the building’s facades, supported on concrete slabs. The idea is to reveal the individual character of each space, as if the structure were a series of private houses stacked on top of one another.

Nouvel says the intent of his design was to create a structure with roots, not an updated version of the International style. “I want to make a little city to itself, an urban piece related to the archeology of the place,” he said by telephone from his Paris office.

But the design is a work of psychological as well as urban excavation. Wholly modern, it also reflects the dense network of individual relationships that once gave Beirut its distinct aura -- the sensual intimacy and buzzing humanity of tightly packed spaces.

Souks restored

Meanwhile, Jose Rafael Moneo, the Spanish modernist behind Los Angeles’ Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, has come up with a design for the city’s souks, or central markets, that touches similar themes but with a more conservative bent. The government ordered the old souks bulldozed soon after the end of the civil war -- a decision that still angers many of the city’s preservationists.

As a way of addressing that past, Moneo’s design restores the street pattern established by Phoenician merchants centuries ago. Enormous concrete sheds are set along a central pedestrian spine. Inside, these structures are broken into a grid of small, identical compartments that will house the shops -- an effort to retain the tightly woven fabric of the ancient markets. A number of covered, indoor courtyards will relieve the sense of congestion. Light and natural air will spill into the halls through large light scoops.

In essence, the design is conceived as a neutral grid, one that allows for a range of personal expression. Yet the purity of its forms also suggests a certain distrust for the chaos that freedom can entail -- as if the design were wagging a finger at the past.

By comparison, Holl’s proposal for the marina, a few blocks west of the future site of Moneo’s souk, seeks to draw these social frictions into the open. Scheduled to break ground in March, it will rise at the hinge between colliding worlds: the moment where the corniche currently ends and the more sterile world envisioned by Solidere begins.

The design includes a private marina, 20 restaurants and 180 residential apartments arranged along a curved spit of land that juts into the Mediterranean. The project is conceived as two overlapping layers, with the public space of the extended corniche above and the private areas of the apartments and restaurants tucked beneath.

But rather than segregate these spaces, Holl’s scheme joins them like interlocking fingers. A series of public stairs links the restaurants to the upper promenade. Glass-bottomed pools are embedded in the restaurants’ rooftops. During the day, the pools will give the restaurants the watery glow of aquariums; at night, they will emit a soft, shimmering light along the promenade.

The idea is to retain the complexity of the old corniche and imbue it with new life. To the east, the marina’s form curves out toward the sea, rising to form a two-pronged platform. A seating area will offer views back to the city and mountains. Below, the apartment complex will be lined with faceted balconies that face the sea. It is an apt image of a city struggling to understand itself -- one that must look in two directions to survive.

The most aggressive challenge to Solidere’s view of the world, however, has been launched by Khoury. Trained in the United States, he has become an increasingly well-known figure in architectural circles because of designs such as the Beirut nightclub B018. Submerged underground, the club has a roof made of two enormous steel panels that open like mechanical louvers. A ring of parking surrounds the site in a no-man’s-land at the city’s edge where a group of Muslim refugees was massacred in 1976.

The project’s bunker-like interior inevitably evokes an open grave. Its wing-like roof structure can also suggest the frenzy of life struggling to reemerge.

The design of the Centrale restaurant in East Beirut, completed in 2000, is intended as a more direct attack against the architectural values of Solidere. The structure’s facade was damaged during the civil war. But rather than clean it up, Khoury decided to leave the scars exposed. A steel frame is built over the facade to stabilize the structure and support a wire mesh skin. The skin is there to protect passersby from falling plaster. But it is also symbolic. It suggests a kind of beauty that refuses to bury the ugliness of the past; instead, it transforms it.

At times, Khoury’s designs can come dangerously close to a romanticized view of suffering. Brimming with adolescent rage, they also display an all-too-keen awareness of current fashion. Yet they are also powerful social commentary. Their aim is to force us to look at the city more closely, to break us out of the haze of denial and nostalgia.

The strength and eloquence of such architectural voices are what make Beirut worthy of the world’s continued attention, even as the violence in the region has moved elsewhere. These voices express a sincere exploration of identity, a desire to find deeper psychological truths. Rather than suppress competing viewpoints, they celebrate them.

That fact alone is an assertion of hope. It holds out the prospect of an uncensored atmosphere, of citizens vying to coexist even as the city’s wounds are still healing. It is out of this more democratic notion of conflict -- as a form of civil and creative engagement -- that Beirut is being reborn.