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Volumeproject.orgRescripting Beirut
15 till 24 August - An International Summer Workshop in Beirut
Studio Beirut offers its second international workshop for architects, graphic designers, social scientists,urbanists, artists, and related disciplines in the arts and sociology. This workshop, extending over thelast two weeks of August 2008 will address the topic “Rescripting Beirut.” In conjunction with thecommission Studio Beirut has received to produce anAlternative Guidebook to Beirut, we propose researchand design projects to confront the obvious lack ofspatial history in the region, to revive and reassessthe past, the present and the future as they manifestthemselves in the spaces, the narratives and the plansfor reconstruction and development that proliferate inthe city and nation. Areas of the city that have nowbeen leveled by war and real estate will bereinvestigated and interventions proposed to revive anawareness of their ongoing history. Wadi Abu Jamil,the old Jewish Quarter, or Northern Saifi, thetraditional red-light district a “behind the bank”could be examples, but the city, transformed byconflict and development, abounds with such chargedand undocumented zones. Research and active creativeproposals will be seen as one synonymous systemimplemented by the directors and the many instructorsalong with the primary contribution of theparticipants in the workshop.
This will be the second such endeavor. In the summerof 2007 the first Studio Beirut Workshop confrontedthe topic of “Public Space”. The participants camefrom ten different countries including Saudi Arabia,Italy, Russia, Slovenia, Jordan, Egypt, Ireland aswell as the Netherlands and Lebanon. They werearchitects, landscape designers, social scientists,artists, linguists, and urban planners. Theinstructional group was as diverse, again drawn frommany countries and including a range of disciplinesfrom political science to fine art. The pace wasfrenetic, with the participants preparing responses tothree exercises given by the directors as well as onegiven by Partizan Publik, one from the Studio Beirutteam and one from the group of social scientistsattending.All these formed a dynamic symbiosis in conjunctionwith a dense series of daily lectures, two symposia atthe Order of Engineers and Architects and three fieldtrips: all in less than two weeks.
The concept was that the group, from its manydisciplinary perspectives, would intensely performinvestigation into the potential to reinvent publicspace as a concept and as a physical fact in a cityand nation where its current existence is ambiguous.This, of course, had direct political implications.Design and research in this case could not beseparated and were required to engage radical societalcriteria. Space became a metaphor for culture and itwill continue to be so in the upcoming workshop.
The Municipality of Beirut provided sites on which towork and a senior official attended the presentationof the participants work on the last day of theworkshop along with several members of the regionalplanning commission. This interaction withadministrative bodies and citizens was essential theintention was also to reach out, engage, and affectinstitutions and attitudes in Lebanon. Studio Beirutaims to always have this double role, as an extremelyactive center focusing on myriad activities and, atthe same time, as a generator of wide cultural ripplesreaching out to Beirut, to Lebanon and to the regionand possibly having impact even in the Netherlandswhere the radically different ways that things occurand policies manifest themselves in Lebanon maygenerate new practices.
If fact one of the great values for a grouppredominantly from Holland and Lebanon was theexposure to the other culture through the processesengaged in at the workshop. The many lectures andpresentations attempted to provide information and,more emphatically, critical models for discussing thatinformation. This was the point, not to feed theparticipants predigested ideas and images of this verydifferent and complex place, but to give them thetools to generate their own. To surprise and overturnthe conventional view of things; to question thoseimposed from outside by all the agencies andorganizations that come to Lebanon with their notionsof what and how it should be described and improvedand likewise to question those offered by localentities who have their predetermined notions of whatand how. We hoped new ways might evolve through theprocess of deep immersion and immediate intervention.
The implications of these workshops are many, but theevents may unfortunately largely remain an intenseeducational event. For it to do more so, for it toengage the complex spaces and practices that defineLebanon, to raise awareness and implement change,finally it is essential that there be the active anddefinitive participation of Lebanese individuals andinstitutions. In all its future activities StudioBeirut will remain a forum for discussion, researchand action. The active generation of events in and outof the Studio will be a primary goal.
Join us this summer for the second, concentratedexercise in putting these ideas into practice. Join anenthusiastic group of participants and committedinstructors and contributors as we dig beneath thescraped wastelands of easy and self-servinginterpretation into the convoluted fabric of thisancient modern metropolis. Participate in makingproposals, formal and ideological, that address ourcultural excavations. Join us, for “we are not out ofbreath.”
