Introduction:

Lebanon is a very small country in the middle-east 10,452 km2. It is nevertheless one of the most beautiful spots in the area. It is located on the edge of a desert zone, but having a fabulous topography of green mountains stepping into the Mediterranean Sea. The land been fertile, it was for a long time a reputed agricultural territory with an intense agrarian activity and therefore a large concentration of population. This population is composed from a big variety of beliefs and religions. Eighteen official religions are recognized in Lebanon and one of them being the right not to have a religion.

It has a history of being one of the most democratic and free countries in the Arab world. It also had a long series of conquers throughout the centuries, Greek, Roman, Assyrian, Babylonian, Canaanite/ Phoenician till the Arabs, the Ottomans and the French in the last century and Syrians in the last decades.

After its independence in 1943 till the seventies, Lebanon had quite a flourishing economy based essentially on a successful banking system and a booming touristic and service sector. It was considered then to be the “Swiss of the Middle-east”.

The civil war:

Then came 1974.

The civil war or what the Lebanese journalist Ghassan Tueni named “a war for the others”, struck the country and in particular the capital (Tueni’s statement refers rightfully to the fact that the civil war was a war fought by other nationalities on Lebanese land: Palestinians fleeing their country, Syrians that received the green light from Lebanese parties to enter the country and, last but not least, is the Israeli bombing and invasion of southern Lebanon)

It had many facets and different periods according to the intervention of many foreign countries their interests in time.
The war ended in 1990 and the results reported were 150,000 people killed and another 100,000 permanently handicapped by injuries. Approximately 900,000 people, representing one-fifth of the pre-war population, were displaced from their homes. Perhaps a quarter of a million emigrated permanently.

Beirut witnessed a huge amount of battles during the different phases of the war.
One of the most famous one is the Battle of the Hotels, in the fancy area that used to be Beirut hottest touristic point.
The city was divided by the Green line, a demarcation frontier between East and West Beirut. This Front battle border was located in a big part in the downtown area or what is called nowadays the Beirut central district (BCD).
This zone was heavily damaged and after the war its reconstruction was undertaken by a joint stock company called Solidere. A masterplan was developed to reestablish the infrastructure and public domain and a waterfront area was added to the existing sea edge.

Keywords

Mapping, visible, invisible, war, landmark, memory, future, peace.

Many buildings in a critical status were destroyed during this process but a good chunk remained and was restored following a conservation plan.
The rest of the city did not get as lucky to have a vision attached to its reconstruction, and began rebuilding obliterating any trace of the war, in quite a chaotic and unplanned way. The downtown was physically separated from the adjacent neighborhoods by a series a highways that did cut it physically and emotionally from the rest of the city.

Even though the civil war has ended almost 25 years ago, some physical remains of the Lebanese civil war are still visible in the urbanscape of Beirut and most of the then in the central district or at its peripheries. The downtown has started the reconstruction process in 1994 but has been slowed down by many political and economic crisis in the country and the region. The rest of the city is pursuing it search of profitability at any cost. So we are witnessing an uncontrolled increase of towers in urban villages with inadequate infrastructure attached. Among all this chaos buildings from before the war era still mix happily in the rising modernity and the decaying heritage.

Mapping the Visible:

Somehow the war signs has been diluted from the city skyline. But strangely enough some major buildings remain as war veterans in the urban-scape of Beirut. These highly visible landmarks of lasted twenty years after the conflict as guardians of the collective memory, watching over a city that is rising from ruins into a forest of concrete and glazing. Because of the abrupt end of the war with no real reconciliation, the Lebanese has adopted the amnesia as the best way to move on. And their city is the reflection of this post-war attitude.

The importance even unintentional of these buildings is a duty of remembrance, reconciliation and transmission to the future generations going forward together.

The Saint-Georges hotel

Standing on the seafront next to the newly built Zaituni bay refusing categorically to integrate its surrounding neighbors (Solidere). Irony of the faith decided that the blast that killed Rafik Hariri (Lebanese prime minister and one of the creator and main shareholders of Solidere) in 2005 happened exactly in front of its entrance. The building was seriously damaged and a memorial with a bronze statue of the assassinated late prime minister was erected just in front to it. The hotel building is still unrestored and not used till now. The beach part of it is functioning all year round. A big slogan “STOP SOLIDERE” decorates proudly the main façade. It is turning it into a very powerful controversial landmark: from a landmark of Beirut golden age into a symbol of urban resistance.

The interesting part of the story is that the owner of the saint-Georges is reclaiming so loud and clear the maritime property not to restore it to the public domain but to for himself as part of the hotel property.

St. Georges Hotel in Beirut is a landmark building. Parisian architect Auguste Perret came to Beirut to design the building with Antoine Tabet (a local architect).

The building was severely damaged during the civil war. It is completely surrounded by the recent urbanization of towers and high-rises what is the Hotel district in Beirut central district Masterplan.

Burj el Murr

Burj el Murr is an unfinished tower of 40 story high dominating the skyline of downtown Beirut. Its construction started in 1974 and by 1975, the start of the Lebanese civil war, 28 of its floors were built. Despite the unrest, the work continued until the whole structure was erected.
The building was structurally daring relying on a hollow tube concrete structure with its facades as the load bearing walls braced by the core buildings shear walls. It managed to resist the weapons used on the battle-field and to continue to exist as an icon in the post war period.

This high and thin concrete structure with no particular architectural or urban quality stands there guarding the edge of the downtown district. Inhabited by the army at ground level and by ghosts at skylevel.
All the buildings around it are midrise structure, almost all restored or rebuilt at the end of the war.

Holiday Inn

The Holiday Inn Beirut is a ruined hotel in Beirut on Omar Daouk Street in the center of Minet el Hosn neighborhood. The hotel was constructed between 1971 and 1974 by Lebanese developer Abdal Mohsin Kattan and designed by French architect André Wogenscky, working with Lebanese architect Maurice Hindié. The 26-story hotel included a revolving restaurant on the top floor, a nightclub on the 25th floor, and 400 guest rooms. It was part of a mixed-use complex known as St. Charles City Center, including a cinema, offices, shops, restaurants, a supermarket. It was constructed on the site of the Hospital St Charles, which had been founded by the German religious order of Saint Charles Borromeo in 1908, but had moved to Baabda, north of Beirut, in 1963.

The Holiday Inn opened in 1974, at the height of Beirut's economic boom, when the city was the glamorous tourist center of the Middle East.

The Holiday Inn operated normally for only a year before the civil war started in 1975. The hotel was a war zone beginning on October 25, 1975 in a months-long conflict known as the Battle of the Hotels. Over 25,000 combatants fought for control of a group of towering luxury hotels including the Holiday Inn and the adjacent Phoenicia Inter-Continental, resulting in over 1000 deaths and 2000 injuries. The hotel was seen as a heavily symbolic goal by both sides in the conflict, and fighting for it was fierce, finally ending on March 21, 1976.

After the battle, the ruined hotel was stripped to its concrete skeleton by scavengers. It became a battleground again during the 1982 Lebanon War. Since then, the hotel has remained a gutted, bullet-riddled ruin, looming over the city. The ownership of the structure is split. The Lebanese company that owns half of it, “Compagnie Immobiliere Libanaise”, wants to renovate it and convert it to condos, while the Kuwaiti group that owns half of it wants to demolish it and construct a new tower on the site. As a result of the disagreement, it remains empty and untouched, decaying slowly.

This massive statement of the seventies overlooks the new hotel district of Downtown with its structure highly damaged by the war and post-war abandon, statement of both a golden and dark era. Quite a powerful presence in the city.

The Dome

‘The Dome’ or ‘the Egg’ was planned as a cultural building: Movie Theater.

It is part of the ‘Beirut City Center’, a multi-use complex was commissioned in 1965 to be designed by the Lebanese architect Joseph Philippe Karam (1923-1976). The programs was a mix of leisure activities space (shopping mall, cinema) along with office spaces. The complex is a set of buildings, which consists of two high towers and the egg-shaped shell protruding from a large column supported plinth. When the civil war started in 1975 the construction of the ‘Beirut City Center’ was still unfinished. Only one tower was built. The Egg and a large void for underground parking are the remains of the ‘Beirut City Center’ after many bombing and intentional or unintentional demolition through the years. The Egg, has shifted from being unobtrusive to an eye-catching Monolithic monument, homage to Brutalist architecture.

The initial decision in the Solidere Masterplan was to destroy, but because of a popular fondness, many concepts and urban strategies have been considered for the site keeping the Egg, to name some Bernard Khoury and Christian de Portzamparc. Until recently it was used temporarily for art exhibitions and clubbing events. But now it is fenced of and inaccessible.

Heritage activists protested against the further demolition of Beirut‘s built cultural heritage and the loss of it long-standing complex identity. A documentary by Lebanese artist Aimee Merheb called “Saving the Egg” demands respect using it as an example and emphasizes on its importance as a war-scarred building in the urban terrain more important than economical profit.

Due to its breathtaking view onto Martyr square, and the very high constructible area allocated on it in the Masterplan. Greed and real state being what they are in Lebanon, it has very little chances of remaining.
Although it is one of the essential component driving the conversation on the "To be or not to be" existence of urban war-scarred signs in the city.

The Grand Theatre

The Grand Theatre is an old theatre built in 1929 by Jaques Tabet, a poet and theater lover, the Grand Théâtre hosted throughout the years international performances and movie productions. It located in the heart of downtown Beirut facing Maarad street, Lebanon.

The Grand Théâtre was designed by Youssef Aftimos and part of a commercial center that housed a hotel, rental apartments, offices and shops. The construction of the Grand Théâtre on the corner of Emir Bashir and Syria streets blocked the original 1878 design of a major thoroughfare connecting the harbor to the Pine Forest at the city’s southern limit. The horseshoe-shaped auditorium of the theatre accommodated 630 seats with an orchestra, two balconies, and machinery for stage sets. A small electrically-operated steel dome slid on rails, allowing the roof to open for ventilation. A domed ceiling with decorated stained glass covered the lobby. The Grand Théâtre opened in 1929 with a French musical called ‘No, No, Nanette,’ adapted from a Broadway success. The theater later hosted the Comédie Française, the Ballet des Champs-Elysées, the Egyptian Ramses Group, and concerts by Abdel Wahab and Umm Koulthoum.

The Grand Théâtre also screened international movie productions and catered for major literary and charity events. From the 1960s onwards, it operated solely as a movie theater.

Post-war reconstruction of the mid-1990s restored the façade of the Grand Théâtre, adapting the building for contemporary use.

The project of a hotel was designed at some point by Richard Rogers, but slowed down due to financial feasibility of it.

Martyr square

Martyr Square has a complex history echoed by the multitude of names given to it during different eras: Fakhreddine Gardens, Place des Canons, Sahat el Bourj. This square was once our ambassador to the world through postcards or photos showing it in the best or worst times.

From a square in front of one the gates of the city walls to the core of the old town of Beirut, the square was Sahat Al Bourj, name kept until the breakout of the civil war in 1975.
During the glory days before the war Martyrs ‘Square had developed into a civic space for a modern city. At the time it had all the ingredients needed to be a successful public area: streets, sidewalks, greenery, public transport, cultural and entertainment buildings. Then the civil war happened. Martyrs’ Square that was located on the demarcation line, was severely damaged. The buildings surrounding it were destroyed leaving a sad empty patch of desolation. Currently and because of so many historical interruptions in the political and governmental life of Lebanon and a lack of political priority, emptiness dominates this emblematic square.

The “Solidere” master plan had a strong ambition to put Beirut on the world map as a global city. Martyrs’ Square was an essential part of this vast operation. The design wanted to emphasize the square and make it an example of grandeur and splendor. What better model to follow than the Champs-Elysées in Paris, France? Therefore the size of Martyrs’ Square was to be adjusted to match the famous French avenue. Moreover the plan required a consistent view to the sea. To achieve this aim the demolition of the iconic building Cinema Rivoli was seen to be necessary.
New dimensions for new ambitions, the square was now 70 meters wide, 350 meters long and was only 650 meters away from the Mediterranean Sea which it faced directly. In this process the site had changed geometry, having been through different eras more of a square and then a rectangle, it was now longitudinal. Even wider and longer, the effect unfortunately did not tally with the magnificence that had been imagined. The comfortable former geometry was of the kind that makes public squares act as an urban saloon where people like to sit, walk and enjoy urban life. Instead, because of the improper geometry, this new shape made it seem and function as a corridor for vehicles.
Throughout its history Martyrs’ Square never had a religious building on it, the spirit of the square was a civic and cultural one. Administrative buildings and three cinemas were the highlights of the place. One of the movie theatres was the emblematic City Center Dome or more commonly called “the Egg” by the Beirutis for its oval shape. The sacred buildings were diffused in the rest of the Downtown area. These mosques, churches and synagogues neighbored each other and were also successfully integrated into the urban fabric in scale and materials. The architecture of the sacred was not ostentatious but respectful of the other. This spirit was the same as the communal living that is essential and characteristic to the Middle East and in particular Lebanon, a country that even refers to itself in its constitution as “living together”.
Today we can observe that the most prominent building on the square is a mosque. The Mohamad al-Amine mosque is huge, omnipresent and visible from all streets and

surrounding neighborhoods. We can also notice the emergence of an even taller bell tower belonging to the adjacent church. The rise of competition between religions.
The absence of a new general master plan to tie the whole city of Beirut together in the reconstruction allowed Solidere to treat its downtown like a “paradise in a box”. At which end, the company stripped the district of its environment and installed a series of highways all around the downtown area, isolating it from surrounding neighborhoods by this lack of pedestrian connectivity. The urban life of the square was particularly affected by that situation.

The phasing strategy of Solidere did not help also the integration and connection with the adjacent neighborhoods. The reconstruction that started in the center of the downtown area enhanced the effect of an island surrounded by a desert and bordered by an uninviting road network. If the rebuilding process had started instead at the edges, it would have benefited from the proximity and dynamism of an existing and lively city. This would have meant starting at the southern edge linking Zaitunay bay to the Corniche and Ain-el-Mreisseh, and at the northern edge, where Martyrs’ Square connects downtown to Gemmayzeh and Achrafieh. Martyr square should have been one of the first component to be restored in downtown in order to offer an urban rebirth to the civic life and a reconciliation with the city.

On 14 March 2005, one month after the death of the business tycoon and former prime minister Rafic Hariri, Martyrs’ Square witnessed an incredible spontaneous gathering of the Lebanese population. They kicked the Syrian regime out that day. It was called the Cedar Revolution. One million people carrying Lebanese flags assembled there: united. The 25,000 square metres of urban void at the edge of downtown Beirut suddenly made full sense, for a while, like in the old times. The spontaneity of this gathering was a true sign and a true yell of hope that was produced by a population longing for a civic, democratic and independent political and urban life in Lebanon. It is true that for a long time we had obliterated even the thought of it. Soon again disappointment invaded the people’s hearts and again we observed a loss of interest in the political scene due to the pettiness of politicians and their sectarianism and greediness. The square still filled up with people from time to time, but only to bear witness to our divisions: different flags, different affiliations and different visions. After that, the burst of patriotic feeling was diluted by the hardness of daily life brought about by the permanent crisis that the country faced. Public life was unable to hang on to this vast space which seemed to have no defined edges and limits, and carried no identity or spirit.
The square was back to its status as a no-man’s-land, a place where one passes through like a ghost. To Beirut, its heart was just another crossing point.
In June 2004 Solidere launched an international design competition for Martyrs’ Square grand axis. Antonis Noukakis & Partners Architects from Greece were the competition winners. In 2012, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Paris, completed an urban design study for the same axis but up until now nothing concrete has been completed.
This remains a frustration for Beirutis as the heart of their city is a wasted space. Martyrs’ Square has become a place they cannot relate to and therefore do not enjoy. The largest square in the city, absent, shapeless and acting more as a vehicular corridor than a buzzing urban salon as it was in the seventies should regain its importance in Beirut.
A laboratory of urban identity designed by the citizens themselves as an intrinsically Lebanese space: generous, extroverted and fun.

Beit Beirut

Built by the Lebanese architect Youssef Afandi Aftimos in 1924 and then raised by two further floors by the architect Fouad Kozah in 1932, the neo-ottoman style building known as the "Yellow House" or the "Barakat Building" stands on the crossroad of Damascus Street and Independence Street. The ochre-coloured sandstone used for its construction gave it its name.
The Yellow House comprises two bourgeois style houses, four-stories high plus a roof terrace. The central axis of the building is completely open to the sky. It leads to the main entrance and a front courtyard giving access to the staircases up to the properties and a passageway under the building that leads to the leafy rear courtyard. The facades of the two buildings are joined by raised columns, decorated with fine ironwork overlooking the city. Located on the former "green line", the Yellow House was a forward control post and sniper base during the civil war. In addition to its strategic location, its airy architecture with its transparency and varied shooting angles, was used for military purposes to control the surrounding area, known as the "Sodeco Crossroads".
Due to the combination of domestic architecture and "war architecture", created by the snipers that occupied the building during the civil war, it was crucial to retain it as a major landmark in the city where trace of the war was efficiently removed.
This strategical building at the edge of the Green line, highly damaged by the war, was saved from demolition by the civil society (particularly by Mona Hallak) and the commitment of the City of Beirut which led to an expropriation procedure granted on grounds of public interest in 2003. Under the terms of the expropriation decree, the Yellow House will be restored to accommodate a museum, a cultural and artistic meeting place, a facility for archiving research and studies on the city of Beirut throughout history, an urban planning office for the City of Beirut and an underground car-park.
The project was initiated in 2008 following a cooperation agreement between the City of Beirut and the City of Paris. The architect commissioned to restore was Youssef Haidar.
He decided to kept all its scars and fears in order to stands there as a testimony of an unfortunate period in Lebanon’s history. A living reminder of the damages of wars and violence and the miscommunication between brothers.
This building had witnessed terrible events. And now it stand like a veteran with it prostheses leg and arm telling the story to the future generations. Not as lesson but as an urban morality, a duty.
In October 2017, the artist Zena El Khalil made an art exhibition called “Sacred catastrophe: Healing Lebanon” talking intimately to the building and its traumatic past and to all what happened during the war. A peaceful and healing series of installations aimed to remember and forgive and go forward along with series of workshop and lectures that intended to open on this buried topic of the war and its scars.

Mapping the Imagined: The Landmark

A project by Jean Nouvel in the downtown area. The site is overloaded by a built-up area appropriate for a high-rise zoning area, yet in the middle of a fine grain, mid-rise zone of old building and streetscape.
Jean Nouvel response to this paradoxical building brief, was to create a massive tower and wrap it with a skin that reminds us of a façade after a battle has gone passed it. This invented

way to insert back war where it happened and was erased is quite odd. Especially that oversized structure is rather inappropriate in a city that already is full of its own real scars and not really knowing how to comprehend them yet.
The project stopped for other reasons, from a further past. Roman archeological remains appeared when they dag the basement. It prevented us from having deal from that rather dark vision of the Future.

Mapping the Disappeared:

On the other hand, signs of more recent events like the 2006 Israeli bombing in the southern suburbs of Beirut have totally disappeared from the whole territory while there are still reminiscence of the 25 years old Civil War still present in the rest of the city.
It is true that the civil war extend for a longer period and involved much more regions, but the August 2006 bombing was quite intense and with heavier weapons, meaning quite hard core damages.

The silent case of Dahieh

During the 2006 July war, the southern suburbs of Beirut were severely bombed and destroyed by the Israeli army/ aviation. Whole areas were knock on their knees to the ground: Mostly residential with high density. As soon as the war ended, the political party in charge of these areas started a reconstruction campaign before the government was capable of organizing itself or any other official or unofficial organization for that matter.
The masterplan was efficient and radical, the design repetitive and the construction fast. Before anyone had realized it, the south suburbs was back on its feet. No work on any form of memory, dialogue or consultation were visible. But everyone was back home, no matter how big was his trauma.
The problematic of having erased this event from the national memory makes us vulnerable to not having understood or learnt the lesson.
This traumatic period and its results could have been an opportunity to integrate this periphery inside the city and its community as a fully Lebanese nationals caring for their city and country with no external allegiance.
But we seemed to have missed this chance and we continue to live in the city as different groups sharing the same geographical location.

Mapping the Invisible: The Chaos of the city

Beirut is a mess. No planning monitors the growth of the city and plans its way into the future. The Masterplan is inexistent and not even mentioned.
The city is a patchwork of planned quarters where we are replacing heritage and human scale by towers and gigantism and totally unformal settlements results of the war era with no authority on them. The basic infrastructure is totally insufficient for the demographic requirements and especially with the crisis of the two millions Syrian refuges that we are facing.

The public domain is shrinking at the expenses of the quality of life of all the city inhabitants and their rights. Public spaces, public transport and affordable housing are surreal notions in a crowded suffocating reality.

The isolation of the Downtown

The Beirut central district or Beirut downtown or what is known as the “Solidere” area is a planned piece of the city that was hijacked by a private company to reconstruct it.
The initiator of this enterprise and one of the main shareholder happened to be the prime minister at the time “Rafic Hariri”. The coincidence made that this part of town, the heart of it really was literally cut out from the rest of the city. A network of highways shopped it from the surroundings. Poorer areas and heavily destroyed by the war.

East/ West Beirut

The East Beirut canton was a Christian-dominated geopolitical region that existed in Lebanon from 1976 until its gradual erosion following the Taif Agreement and the end of the civil war. It was one of the wartime state-like territories, controlled by the Lebanese Forces (LF) militia, and was separated in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, from Muslim majority West Beirut by the Green Line, extending outside the capital northward to include the region

of Keserwan up till the city of Byblos on the western coast and the northern part of Mount Lebanon to the northeast. It bordered the Zgharta region to the north, which was controlled by a rival Christian militia, the Marada Brigade.

East Beirut was a semi-independent region. It had its own security and legal apparatus, with the LF also providing the local population with subsidized services, including public transport, education and healthcare among others, even established “the National Treasury” to be able to tax the population. 60% of the country's industrial capacity was located in this canton.

West Beirut is the largely coastal side of Beirut with, it was the major commercial, intellectual, and tourist center of the Arab world, before its transformation during the civil war by the Muslim militias into a lawless, militarized zone contested by confessional and ideological factions. Turf battles, terrorism, rampant street crime, and the lack of centralized authority made the area very dangerous for both local and foreigners. The Syrian
troops stationed in Lebanon were quite present there, whereby mostly absent from East Beirut.

Because no effort was done to reestablishing dialogue after the war. The warlike perception remained alive among the city inhabitants, even though both areas had transformed into a form of post-war urban normality of daily life. The terminology persist and the fear of the other too.

The Green line

The Green Line is the demarcation line between east and west Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War from 1975 to 1990. It separated the mainly Muslim factions in predominantly Muslim West Beirut from the predominantly Christian East Beirut controlled by the Lebanese Front. However, as the Civil War continued, it also came to separate Druze from Alawite,and Sunni from Shia. At the beginning of the Civil War, the division was not absolute as some Muslims lived east of the Green Line and some Christians lived in West Beirut but as is the demarcation line between east and west Beirut the Civil War continued, each sector became more homogenous as minorities left the sector they were in. It wasactually the hot line of combats at this period in History. The appellation adopted the greenery that grew in this uninhabited place. It was commonlyreferred to as the "Green Line", but also the "Demarcation Line". It generally stretched from the North of Beirut to the South, and the primary street that followed the Green Line was Damascus Street. There was no formal line or continual security but it was common to seemilitia checkpoints that people crossing at particular points had to go through and snipers on top of buildings were common (one of the most famous one being the Barakat building or what is now Beit Beirut). Most of the buildings along the Green Line were severely damaged or destroyed during the war. Since the end of conflict, the trace of the war got removed over the years from the urban terrain. Especially inside the Beirut central district, actually the hot line of combats at this period in History. where new real estate project or urban regeneration project took place. The social and mental barriers Even though the war ended the reconciliation process never took place. The politicians got absorbed in the government life and it became impossible to judge or blame anyone and therefore to establish a form of truth or memory common to the Lebanese of the wars. Having said that the results are that in the Lebanese minds same place are still dangerous, inaccessible, belonging to others .Others being frequently people from different religion or more so from different branches of the same religion.

People prefer to stay in their bubbles or more likely what we would describe as their territories. Social mixity exist obviously like in any place but people are careful, suspicious. In Beirut itself some places are considered to be the playground of this or this branch of the different religions.