house of reconciliation the metamorphosis of beirut city centre building projects | beirut lebanon by farid noufaily war modernism reclamation representation truth
The signing of the Ta’if Agreement on 22 October 1989 marked the beginning of the end of the Lebanese Civil War that had raged since 1975. The war ended in March 1991, when the new Leba- nese Parliament enacted the General Amnesty Law, which stated that there were to be no victors and no victims in the war ( la ghalib le maghlub ). Unfortunately, this law allowed the Lebanese people to turn a blind eye to the ugly truths of the war and ushered in an era of uneasy silence in Lebanon, where no word is uttered, no acknowledgement nor responsibility is taken by anyone surrounding the desperate events of the past 33 years. Today, as Lebanon’s political battle for independence and a unified national identity continues, the government still hasn’t supported the public in breaking the silence. I believe that this legislated lack of collective/public self-expression has rendered both the local and the diaspora populations incapable of reconciling with their traumatic past. Though public confessions, art, film and novels have begun to facilitate some discourse, architecture’s role will be to gather, catalyse, and give voice to the countless victims of the war. The rehabilitation of Beirut City Centre Building (CCB) is an architectural proposal to breach the silence.
A failed attempt at modernism... A sinister sniper point along the infamous Green Line... An impromptu brothel during the civil war... A failed retrofit by the Ministry of Finance in 1992... A venue for illegal raves in the mid 1990s... Slated for demolition in 2003... These are but a few of the many different incarnations of the former Beirut CCB which stands just south of Place des Martyrs
and is the only remaining ruin in the centre of Solidère’s newly- restored Beirut Central District. Referred to by locals as the bubble, the soap, the blob or, most often, the egg, the ovoid CCB was cursed by the misfortune of being at the exact geographic centre of the civil war, and has been blackened by neglect ever since the war ended. Even in ruins, the 6,000 m 2 building remains a remarkable surviving icon from Beirut’s golden age of Modernist architecture.
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On Site review 20: archives and museums
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