As a territory that has historically been influenced by many civilizations, Beirut has evolved as a crucible of difference, continuously assimilating foreign influences into its vernacular. Its fabric, an amalgamation of arrangements and styles, evolved by a Levantine history dating back nearly four thousand years. Beyond the devastation that came with war, the language of the city, its organized chaos, has resiliently evolved to symbolize this layered repository of its history.

The very act of breaking ground in the city has become a chronicled journey through these layers, unearthing the ruins of civilizations past; of ancient Phoenician footprints, appropriated in the course of Hellenistic and Roman occupation; with an evolved vernacular aesthetic adopted from its Ottoman occupiers and the Cadastral rule by the French. The complexity of this layered influence forces us architects to dwell back on the complexity which we inadvertently absorb, ramify, complexify, or purge.

We set out to explore the inherent influence of these civilizations across our history in juxtaposition to the globalized dynamic of influx and influence in the twenty-first century. We retreat to an architectonic measured against the scale of our social geology, against the tectonics of the migration of people throughout our past, and the migration of information and technology in our future; An articulation with history and a dialectical journey through an evolution of a stratified national vernacular identity, set within a context of excavation, and a choreography of construction.

“It may be space more than time that hides consequences from us, the ‘making of geography’ more than the ‘making of history’ that provides the most revealing tactical and theoretical world” Soja, Edward W. 1989. Postmodern Geographies

We break ground in Martyrs Square, Downtown Beirut; a site that has long posed a tear in the urban fabric of the city, oriented along a line that once divided it. We obtrude down the excavation with a structure, a grid scaffold. It becomes a compulsory loan to the dig, organizing the concord of languages across the journey through these layers of our past. It is a narrative of space responding to the context of the excavation and the geological relief of the excavation walls. It transitions us across a succession of platforms nestled within this trestle. A succession affected by a constant proliferation of grid space and voids by the consciousness of time and distance.

As we leave the grid and are in the ubiquitous excavation, speed replaces the distances of time and space, and we submit to the ultimate precondition hovering just above the water. A slow invisible montage replaces our construction and the frames disappear, only to give birth to a new form of concentration, that of the Dais and the Totem. The totem is a manifestation of necessary failure, of closure or ultimate unresolvable contradictions and the impossibility of the future. We ascend through it, up through its dematerialized soffit, back up to the city that drove us down there in the first place.

Our proposition is that of a phenomenological experience, an architecture simultaneously written in the multiple languages of our past and present, intelligible only within its stratified context; a future relic of an identity that continues to evolve, just as it always had, as it is impacted by greater international exchange.

[ Editor’s note: The above essay was written by Galal Mahmoud in conjunction with GMA’s ‘Museum of Civilizations’ project featured at the 2014 Venice Biennale International Exhibition. ]

 

Architect Galal Mahmoud currently lives in Beirut. His childhood was spent in the ancient Phoenician port of Byblos on Lebanon’s Mediterranean coast. Born to Egyptian parents with an English grandmother and Lebanese citizenship, Galal lived in France for several years after fleeing the Lebanese civil war with his family in 1976. He graduated from the Ecole d’Architecture de Versailles in 1986. In 1996 he founded GM Architects in Beirut, specializing in the luxury hotel and upscale seaside resort markets. GMA branched to Abu Dhabi, UAE in 2006.