log by Raafat Majzoub

You can feel bad about ripping the wrapper before opening the book, or you can just flip the page.

This book is dedicated to whomever decides to flip the page. I would particularly like to thank some people and things - that without them, this piece wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have been what it is dad, for the constant questioning and late-night debates - for letting me know that an answer is yet another question mom, for acknowledging my bedroom junk as study models maya, for pretending not to be bothered by my overnight crankiness * sara, for being there - for not being the friend that thinks friendship is based on complimenting each others work-i thank you for the push ryam, for the long phonecalls, the honesty and the lightbulbs haig, for the side-debates, feedback, raping so-called public space and everything random * joel condon, for not being the typical academic advisor - for letting me think for myself sans template * the building across the street from my house, for letting me in while being demolished - showing me a new romance between man, building and machine my rented camera, for letting me be selfish enough to still frames * the obstacle, for me to override

volume one

This thesis analyzes and negates contemporary architectural methods of dealing with abandoned buildings in Beirut. It takes into consideration the context as the main element in the framework of designing an alternative method based on the concept of progression – the admittance of transience of the built. It is a study on the ex-Holiday Inn hotel building – Beirut, discussing its existence and potential. It proposes an initiative intervention in the form of a timeline-based program taking the Holiday Inn from an experiential – documented decomposition, to produce a steel matrix three dimensional trace where the new building will be erected. It proposes an archiving machine – building hybrid that fuses with Beirut city both physically and metaphysically via programmed function and random highly sensual information interface.

OUTLINE INTRODUCING THE FRAMEWORK Beiruti in denial – passive stakeholder Postwar abandoned layer Active component – monopoly contracting Discussing Solidere ARCHITECTURAL DIMENSION Nip/Tuck instead of resolution Clashes in multiple ‘national’ identity Aesthetics to safeguard the ‘Lebanese’ identity Academic vs. Citizen perspective THE OBJECT DIVINE Replacing experience with semiotics The icon vs. the ‘iconified’ Differing criteria in building evaluation Vicious loop of ‘contractor demolition’ Issues of acquired identity ARCHITECTURE AS CONTEXT Built is temporary Saturation with respect to context Renovation – act of denial Contemporary architecture not given proper evaluation as opposed to the robber of culture and icons Architecture vs. Building Integrating transience in architecture / progression HOLIDAY INN BEIRUT Ruin of ‘Modern Beirut’ Legacy transcending its concrete Negotiated presence / future Setting alternative value parameters – the contemporary state HOLIDAY INN BEIRUT – NOW Outside the comfort zone Contextualization as initiative methodology Brief history Physical description Contemporary boundaries – security

HOLIDAY INN BEIRUT - EXPERIENTIAL STATUS No allowable access Alien proprietors Lack of proper documentation Erasing the Holiday Inn from contemporary communal memory Using alternative site analysis – featuring the inaccessibility of the site as main component in site analysis SITE ANALYSIS Observation from Solidere border – 360degree analysis Phoenicia hotel Saint George Marina Normandy Landfill Monroe hotel Burj el Mur Holiday Inn Hotel Ain el Mreiseh drift Residential vs. Service zoning Visual filter to Holiday Inn Residual spaces Death of program and birth of leftovers Security kiss of death Spatial comparison with Holiday Inn Stroll around Holiday Inn block – scenario 1 – pedestrian The sidewalk The metal barriers Security barriers Ain el Mreiseh – contrast Stroll around Holiday Inn block – scenario 2 – personal The gaps between the barriers Concrete balustrade Holes in concrete walls The perception of in-out Alley between Phoenicia and Holiday Inn Ain el Mreiseh – gaps between buildings – dead ends – view of Holiday Inn Allocation of viewpoints Viewpoint I Residential Building across the street – under construction Volumetric of Holiday Inn in motion Eye level perpendicular to Holiday Inn façade Viewpoint II Starco Bloc C – 10th floor platform Relationship to Solidere – serial – open spaces – towers

Viewpoint III Platinum Tower floors 28 to 32 Relationship with Achrafieh – Ras Beirut – Corniche – Phoenicia Hotel Eye level above Holiday Inn DISCUSSING AN INITIATIVE LOGIC Perspective of renovation Perspective of demolition – inevitable Need of a framework that respects contextual – multifaceted nature of the built Criteria of transformation for planned to non-program Alternative parameters – topographical extension of Ain el Mreiseh – Sculpture – Reference – Canvas Analogy of the sloped site “THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY” Any perception is an abstraction of the real There is no understanding of the Holiday Inn Differing criteria – no assertive definition Communal and Personal property CHOSEN PARAMETERS FOR ARCHITECTURAL INTERVENTION Access Material Progression Semiotics – Acquired Identity INTERVENTION AS PROCESS -I am proposing an extensively documented, experiential, serial decomposition and composition of the ex-Holiday Inn complex as initiation to the procession of this architecturePHASE ONE Initiation of documentation Viewing platforms Recording audio and video – focus Holiday Inn Informal programming Mixed access Create the tangibility of the outside Offer new perspective to the building PHASE TWO Ignition of steel reinforcement of the building – 3D tracing Partial demolitions Inverse progression of built to void Elaboration of viewing platforms – closer to demolition

PHASE THREE Starts simultaneously after PHASE TWO when steel lattice becomes clear Construction of the new building THE PROGRAM Post-Contemporary Arab Media Archive (ing) Building and Machine co linearity Machine Recording nodes – film and audio Location of the built Dispersion in the city Automatic Archiving Random display on façade – kinetic dynamic canvas Random audio FM broadcast

Program – Media issues Archiving and Database Studios – Audio | Video – recording and editing Performance venue Program – Temptation Ground floor city incubator Introduce economic and leisure function – case study cornich Introduce property rental – private service sector THE STAKEHOLDERS The pedestrian Beiruti Arab cultural - recording deposit Media Industry Economic zoning Depends on activity producing programs – market – amusement park – pub ATTRIBUTES Effect on use of surrounding areas – re-indentifying Solidere – the spectator Arab Media Volt Recording raw ‘contemporary’ – un-interpreted history Visual Library Temporary Structure – Malleable EXISTENTIAL DISCUSSION Proposing a progressive life to the built Focal point of program could be virtual – transferrable Architecture – physical \ metaphysical Re-discussion of transience Re-valuing the process of architecture

FRAMEWORK _ POSTWAR BEIRUT An indicative trait of the relatively healthy Beiruti, is that he/she is in a state of constant denial, denial of the past, the present and a prospective, almost inevitable future of disorientation and instability. This could be mapped by simply reflecting on the history of the country since the official inauguration of Lebanon as an independent republic until the current day, with turmoil transcending local/national focal points. A usual assessment of the war(s) could go into psychological impacts on the individual, or more sociological realms of the urban progression. There is a sector of post-war Beirut that is often appropriated by rather capitalistic movements, a spatial offspring of the war, the residual built. 14

photo source; al balad newspaper

It is rare, in our post-modern academic / romantic Beirut the cases where we acknowledge the disappearance of our beloved relics of our modern golden age (before the Lebanese Civil War 1975). It, and later consecutive wars left us with an abundance of textured concrete statues, hollow ex-buildings that impose themselves as a new topography to the city mass.

The emergence of monopoly contracting and giants such as Solidere, The Lebanese Company for the Development and Reconstruction of Beirut Central District s.a.l, started devouring this layer of sentimental mourning and replacing it with consumerist building models causing rage mostly to the academic tissue in Beirut. To me, this is the fault of the architect. There is a huge chunk of building that architecture does not acquaint itself to: death. Discussing Solidere is important because it is one case study of how local mainstream architecture is dealing with this ‘death’ of the built, and it is the biggest ‘monopolous’ reconstruction movement in the area. Solidere is a property consolidation company, that melted ownerships of the properties of war-raped downtown Beirut into one mold, controlled by itself and distributed as shares to the former owners of the land. It has been commissioned by the Lebanese government in 1994 to take over the task of rebuilding the Beirut central district. The major design scheme of Solidere was within the parameters of metaphors, symbols, resurrection and creation of history and memories. The typical “renovation” project in the central district was composed of a demolition and rebuilding of an aesthetically similar, or simply abiding by the new rules of the designed past. 16

“In addition to the arterial developments of the Solidere scheme, the central markets of Nourieh were completely erased and replaced by an archaeological park that connects through a network of a “memory” paths to various archeological excavations exposing, among other artefacts, a Roman bath, a Phoenician wall and Byzantine mosaics. Most of the old buildings in the residential quarters were destroyed, leaving vestiges of renovated buildings that are kept as a nucleus for future commercial development. With the exception of a small shrine, the medieval Souqs were also destroyed as the result of archaeological excavations and provision of a four floor parking space that will serve the Souqs yet to be. The major preserved quarters were seen to be the areas with a distinguished formal qualities characterized especially by their stylistic distinctiveness as prime examples of what we call Lebanese-Baroque architecture. Stylistically distinct, these buildings are reconfigured into a pedestrian zone whose ground floor is designated as “public space” with restaurant and coffeehouses dotting the sides of the streets, and whose upper floors are devoted to office space.” – Jamal Abed

There is a mainstream tendency to forget. Scars of the past are dealt with by nip/ tuck instead of facing the real issues. The inter-connection and resulting dispatching of the Lebanese as a mass identity has resulted in a collage of sub-issues and sub-identities that would very legitimately go under the ‘cult’ category which drifted the core issues into a post-six-feet-underburial allowing the Lebanese a temporary, but relatively comfortable time lapse. This social factor projected on architectural logic and the built fabric. Buildings of the past eras were plastered and resumed to an earlier aesthetic. There was a race to define an authentic ‘Lebanese Architecture’. The three arched house became the predominant module and façade architecture boomed. There was an attempt to define and create a safe mold for Lebanese architecture. Excess attention was given to the aesthetic cosmetic of the built that architecture created its own barrier for progression. Context became tertiary to form and forced semiotics. The architecture developed into a meaningless symbol, to a signified ‘scenery’, and any trace of an ongoing reality was either plastered or demolished giving way to nothing other than superficial extruded renderings of a brittle past. 18

This could be understood, or at least justified by the average city dweller, with lack of knowledge of the conceptual backstage of architecture, its reasoning, precursors and contextual production. The epidemic though, pierced through the academic layer, where scholars saw an opportunity in this residual built layer as a standing historical marker of past glory and became leaders of mummifying buildings that date to different eras defying any chance of proper thinking of a post-war resolution of such spatial status quo. This scholar barricade redefined the built, causing the production of the icon. The architecture shifted from being an experiential dimension, to a guarded artifact stripping it from its most basic spatial value. The built morphed into a myth, and this created myth deformed the purpose of space, and demolished the natural relationship between the human and the built, replacing it with a celestial yearning to maintain and polish this holy forbidden object.

With this taken at hand, you can observe two layers of symbolism, the icon and the ‘iconified’, which are mistaken as being the same, or referencing the same type of ‘signified’. The icon could be defined as the intentional signifier. Martyr’s statue in downtown Beirut is an icon and shrine for the martyrs of war. A building is not an icon. A building is an ‘iconified’ object, which is no less powerful or less important, but the process of reaching this state of iconography is problematic. A space could naturally become analogous to certain experience or activity, based on aesthetic or programmatic characteristics. It could also become an icon through the pumping of precast ideas and ideological tags. Dating a building to a specific era i.e. the modern age, the French or Ottoman mandates is not a reason enough to glorify and preserve it. The assessment of the built should constantly link back to its validity as a consumption of space and certify a contextual outline. Beyond this being a conceptual dilemma that could easily stop at the point of an opinionated cul-de-sac it is useful to assess a real cycle of building mummification.

To do so, we could start from a building being a functional entity, a working tissue in the city. Due to circumstance, this building is reconstructed with the persona of a saint. It has become holy, untouchable, and beyond reach of mortal intervention. It has become, as one might argue, a necessary hint of the past, a reminder of war, so that one wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t forget, or a symbol of design wonder. The sheer fact that this has been stated, leaves the building to a vicious loop. The building could be demolished directly by some contractor, leaving its iconic value â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;the fingerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, or it could be maintained or renovated. Either way, after it is renovated, there will be a point where it will be decided that the time has come for it to be demolished, due to material expiry for starters. This said, it is obvious that freezing a building is a temporary impotent attempt to grasp a fading past, without an actual success in learning or progressing with it as a cultural or technical precursor. In a design discourse, buildings should be thought of as transient. The built environment is temporary because of laws of Newtonian nemesis, to say the least. Regardless of that matter, architects have fought, in contradiction, for buildings to save them from being demolished. It is justified to disbelieve in the act of demolition in the context of instantaneous delete of an urban object, especially when it is to be replaced by a banality. But, what is the most appalling is the act of renewal, when a building is plastered and held to hold itself for another decade or so.

THE TEMPORARY BUILT Buildings should not outlive their context. Context is link to chronology, geography and need. Renovation is an act of denial, a preservation/suspension of an inevitable collapse. Collapse here comes both as a structural and a necessary dimension, where the building reaches a certain saturation in prospect with its context and needs to be resolved. The problem arises here. A romantic view to building plants a need to sustain it. Our impotent design discourse does not know how to adapt to this force. This confusion reinforces the object divine, a symbolic fetish for the observer – killing the program giving birth to the leftover. This leftover poses the question, “what’s next?”, but with a preservational attitude, any action regarding the object divine would be considered a sin. The problem arises here, that any contemporary architecture is not given the chance to be assessed properly, where it is the pre-convicted murderer of the icon. It is robbing Beirut of its glory. 22

“Buildings are not enough, and it takes more these days to make architecture – it is confusing because they think architecture and building are the same thing – buildings are buildings, and to build something is to make a building – architecture is the way we think about buildings, the way buildings are drawn and composed – buildings are the tombs of architecture” – Aaron Betsky Architecture is contextual thinking leading in some cases to the manifestation of physical space. By this statement, it is necessary to define context as the relative framework in which the built would be situated. As previously stated, context is beyond spatial characteristics. It transcends that into input related to duration of use, type of functional criteria, and available resources. The assessment consequently, of contemporary architecture, should be based on such standards of context. Admitting the contextual necessities of the built, it is by consequence that architecture is understood as transient, simply because it is anchored in an ephemeral medium. This issue of the temporary nature of architecture is not a new development on the line of spatial thinking, it is only a confirmation and reminder of the importance of this parameter which seems to be agreed upon in professional and academic architecture but not considered in the actual design and execution of the built. It is a totally unresolved parameter, leaving the demolition or end of the building to the practicality of the contractor, dismissing any of its acquired identity. “Architecture has no role in demolition as it continues to rethink its purpose and to rebuild. Architecture’s disengagement from demolition occurs in the context of urban reconfiguration. Demolition is the unthought in architecture. This detachment has a bearing on the process of building at the point where demolition becomes necessary. This phase of the building process is often left to contractors whose role is merely to clean up.” - John Colenbrander, Maziar Afrassiabi, Sam Basu, Shahin Afrassiabi This sudden death of the building limits the potential of a fully fledged spatial cycle. Contractor demolition cuts off on experiential, functional and processional/progressional aspects of the act of demolition. One of the aims of this compilation is to allow the discussion of architecture as a fully fledged cycle of life and death. Architecture and the built are bound by the brackets of genesis and demise. It is a necessity to define such parameters to induce a more serious contextual built layer. To include demolition as part of the architectural thinking, and ‘the design of death’ as a viable integer of the design process would be a logical approach to the study of the evolution of the built tissue in contemporary Beirut city. The issue of building demolition, mourning of the deceased concrete and its memorabilia value will become unnecessary. Because architecture is contextual, the discussion of any form of architecture, is never concrete with the absence of a case/space. Therefore, I present Holiday Inn, Saint Charles City Center – Beirut. Holiday Inn Beirut is one of the ruins of Modern Beirut. It has a legacy that transcends concrete, and a meaning beyond its existence. For so, it is one of the most negotiated buildings in its context, its presence appreciated, yet its near future uncertain. Acknowledging the former, alternative parameters are set for the choice of this structure. It is chosen due to its contemporary value. Its physical traces of war enrich its spatial significance. It is no longer a building within the comfort zone. It is not as it was meant to be as designed, so it has taken demolition into personal account. The choice of this building is because its importance is not derived from its identity, but rather its acquired identity; it does not matter whether it was the Holiday Inn or not, nor its date of inauguration or previous inhabited program. It is enough to map its physics and relationship to its immediate and temporary context – buildings, topography and people, weather, war respectively – to develop its architecture.

SCOPE OF THE HOLIDAY INN

The Holiday Inn complex was constructed in the mid-1960s by a Kuwaiti-Lebanese company, Saint-Charles. The complex functioned for almost a year before the civil war broke out and it was taken over by fighting Lebanese militias. It was designed by Architects Maurice Hindie, and Andre Wogenscky. The complex consists volumetrically of a predominant 26 floor rectangular block, another separate 8 floor block with a rather triangular footprint with circular smooth edges, and a massive ground block, descending with the steep topographic slope of Ain Mreiseh, and 4 underground levels. The complex housed a five hundred room hotel, a similar sized office quota, a mall and cinemas. During the Lebanese civil war of 1975, the Hotel became a strategic point in the realm of militia battles, where it became the Lebanese Phalengistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; fortress. There was a mainstream scheme at the time, a hotel-as-bunker approach to inter-Lebanese war tactics. The height and location with respect to downtown Beirut made it an inevitable participator in the War of the Hotels, Harb Al Fanadeq. 24

annahar archive â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;76

The previous only functions as an identity check for the history of the building. The interest here goes more into the contemporary value of this piece, so most of the analysis will be based on an acquaintance relationship with the built as is. This was indirectly fortified by the fact that when it comes to gathering information about this building, there was an obvious ‘invisible’ boundary: do not go in, this building is a private property. It is appalling that the sheer fact that the experience of a building in your city is out of reach, so taking the supposed sentimental criteria of THE holiday inn complex – the icon of the communal Lebanese subconscious - made everything even more perplexing. For this sheer fact, a big chunk of the analysis of the building and its relative context was based on this obstacle. Information that became valuable is the information one could eavesdrop from a conversation at a café, or from the night-shift security at the holiday inn building. The perception collage is a design tool that should be taken seriously in this specific scenario. It is obvious now that holiday inn as a building, is not anymore holiday inn, the super-icon. It is not the building that is supposedly mine. The holiday inn is a Kuwaiti-royalty-adopted chunk of Beirut. Tell me more about my icon. This is not a denial of anyone’s icon, it is a critique of this so-called-iconogrpahy. The following is a refusal of the inaccessibility of Holiday Inn. It is the disrespect of the cliché criteria of an icon to start out with. The intervention starts now, on Holiday Inn Saint Charles City Center, respecting and reinforcing the contemporary status of the built as foremost input to the architecture process. 26

SITE ANALYSIS

The concept of site analysis is put in full throttle, in the foreground of the understanding and literal acquaintance to this mass. My preliminary assessment of the standing condition of the building would obviously be by thorough observation.

one Normandy

Saint Georges Marina

Phoenicia Hotel

Monroe Hotel

SOLIDERE limit Holiday Inn

base map courtesy of Solidere 28

For this stage of the observation, I chose a main traffic intersection adjacent to the holiday inn complex. The importance of the location is derived not differently from the importance of the building itself. It is an intersection connecting downtown Beirut to the western side of the city. It also links perpendicularly, the saint George area and the sea Cornice, to the road leading to Achrafieh and the Beirut International airport. Right next to the plot of the Holiday Inn complex rests the renovated, refurbished, architecturally mutilated pink coded Phoenica Intercontinental hotel. What is very notable in this scene, is that this hotel has its offset into the main façade, occupying most of the main street, mainly as parking space, valet and security buffers. There is major street interaction with the inside, the café-introvert-culture peaks shyly to the outside on the seafront corner on a slightly elevated level than the sidewalk. On the opposite façade, activities seem to be limited to personnel only. The street between holiday inn hotel – the cinema and mall façade, now ExpoBeirut entrance – is blocked by the Phoenicia security via guards and mechanical barriers. Looking higher to the relationship between the Phoenicia and the holiday inn complex, it is noticeable that neither overshadows the other, although the Phoenicia activities attempt that programmatically. The holiday inn complex still is very bold volumetrically, and allows itself a large setback – in its massing – distancing the main bulk of it from the Phoenicia block.

Panning downwards to the Saint-Georges marina and the cornice, is a very visually transparent unobstructed view to the Mediterranean. It is another complicated and constantly congested intersection connecting the area of Ain el Mreiseh to the main routing of Achrafieh, Hamra, Downtown and consequently the port. It has a slightly public scheme, especially in comparison to the private Phoenicia Intercontinental sidewalk. The Saint-Georges marina is a recessed project, contributing to the un-obstruction of the view to the Normandy landfill – a large scale extension of the Beiruti shoreline into the sea – a project by Solidere. The Normandy fill is separated from the relatively new set of Dubai-ish wholly glass-clad towers by a wide set of streets, separating it completely from natural pedestrian crossing. This sector of towers has an imported obviously global aesthetic, very clean cut extrusions with a first class view to the sea – and a wishful dream of constituting the Beirut skyline. From where I am standing, these towers are preceded by the Monroe hotel, the bastard child of Phoenicia, at least it looks like it. It is an aesthetic slash of its pink mother, across the super-street. The Monroe does not boast an offset around it, nor a security paranoia, it is in a sense much more interestingly ready for interaction with the city, with its lobby and restaurant fully exposed at street level. The problem here seems to be that the streets themselves are not equipped for pedestrian friendliness. The area in itself is not made for the derive-at-heart, you are not invited to explore, except the entrances and colonnaded interiors of underground parking spaces. Looking inwards towards Beirut, the dominating scene still is the infrastructure, the tunnels, roads, vibrations, the smell of smoke and the vast plots still under construction, plucked ruins and abandoned buildings waiting to be plucked. From here, Bourj el-Murr seems to be an eligible competitor with the holiday inn in the realm of abandoned Beirut absurdia. It is a tall slim square extrusion, still rendered in rough concrete and regularly spaced small square windows onto a dark left-over ‘inside’. In a sense, everything from where I am standing, at least within a hundred meter radius, is in progress, excluding the Holiday Inn complex. As an objective viewer, which I am pretending to be, this is strange. The complex imposes itself logically, as a space with relatively infinite potential. In terms of situation, it satisfies the Trump “location, location, location” trinity, grounded in the focal point of Beirut, connected to major transport hubs, with a beacon-eye-view onto the whole city. The Holiday Inn retains itself still, a frozen potential. There is another anti-christ of a potential that Holiday Inn encompasses. The eastern border of the Holiday Inn plot is the limit of Solidere’s development perimeter, which virtually floods onto the periphery of the southern border of the plot, to include the Phoenicia Intercontinental Hotel to the Solidere urban clique. Normally, you would consider this an opportunity. The process of reshuffling, and revaluing land could have been an opportunity for the Holiday Inn to reclaim its status and increase its value, but in this case, it has done the complete opposite, with the friction of authority between the owners of the property, the Saint Charles Company, owned by Kuwaiti royalty and Solidere. 30

two

Moreover, the imposed death of the Holiday Inn could be of another kind. For an alternative approach to the nature of the programmatic decay of the complex, I decided to move towards it from the Ain el Mreiseh district. Ain el Mreiseh is one of those leftovers of old Beirut. Its urban fabric relies in its fabrication on small alleys and tight habitations that form an intimate neighborhood. The area evolved drastically from this image of a village-like area to accommodate a service zone par excellence. It is now flanked with pubs, restaurants, and hotels. There is still, on the other hand, another face of Ain el Mreiseh, a residential quiet area, tucked close to its locus, on the secondary streets. From Ain el Mreiseh, you could identify a visual filter between it and the Holiday Inn. It is through the alleys and leftover spaces in the city, that the Holiday Inn stands out - framed beautifully, with minimal physical access. Ain el Mreiseh is separated from Holiday Inn by a large construction junkyard connected the lower area, south of Phoenicia Intercontinental, to the upper level, near Clemenceau. The visual filter, from Ain el Mreiseh, was the most intriguing. It was important for me to situate the Holiday Inn within a living context, and this was the most appealing relationship, one that allows a sneak peak every now and then, an alternative – human scale perception – of the super-building. So I started intentionally walking into the dead ends of Ain el Mreiseh, which mostly turned out to be leftover spaces between buildings, formerly residential, now emptied out and used mainly as storage on the ground floor. The issue of the death of program and birth of these leftovers triggers an undeniable analogy with the Holiday Inn itself. The near city was either mimicking the building, or dying in parallel, losing its “architectured” planned objective into a skeletal existence. This skeletal existence stands out as completely detached experiential entity, yet is in essence a byproduct of the built. The slits and ‘in-betweens’ devise a sense of being in a sort of urban-bunker, somewhere that feels safe enough for you to lurk around, somewhere you are free – especially that being free in Beirut is not much of an option anymore with private security “forces” tagged almost everywhere. The leftover becomes a precious destination, in this world where your usual destination requires a choreography you are not trained to carry out, the polite-ness that you did not sign up for as a Beiruti. Instinctively, one could map those leftovers, those rooftops you would struggle to reach, and the alleys with prosthetic steel stairs rendering them passages. The proportion of leftover space to consumed programmed space is remarkably switched as you go nearer to the street separating Phoenicia Intercontinental and the Holiday Inn. As one would progress towards this point, the leftover space increases, and the inhabited on the other hand, decreases drastically. Everything dies when you reach the Phoenicia Intercontinental. There is a clear message of “you do not belong here” being transmitted, by the barriers on the ground, the mechanical stops that emerge from the asphalt, the uniformed security ensemble politely telling you to “shoo..”. There is no potential for survival; an investment could not flourish with no pedestrian activity and it would be such a hassle to live in a place where you practically, not allowed to live. On a naïve note, absurd trees seem to come along with this concept of the leftover. The serenity of the space makes it home for dense greenery, among other creatures, to say the least. I was drawn into one alley, the closest to the Phoenicia Intercontinental, separated from it by just one small street. I thought this could be the most deserted space, yet it seemed very cozy. Walking in, I discovered a shack, a tin and scrap wood hut proved to be the liveliest built around. It turned out to be a canteen for the Syrian workers in the near construction sites. This was an investment I did not think of, as I was romanticizing the “leftovers”. It was grafted onto an old 1930s house, which functioned as storage. The yard, seemingly a previous common yard for three houses,

is appropriated into a brief eating lounge, with its own dysfunctional fountain, just enough to set the mood. From this place, I could spot the Holiday Inn – barely – from between a dense layer of greenery completely isolating the yard from Phoenicia Intercontinental, at least visually.

At this point in time – Monday, January 05, 2009 | 10:48 PM Beirut Local Time – I still have not been allowed access to the Holiday Inn, but have accumulated an interesting number of refusals and one Platinum refusal from the representative company of Sheikha Fadia Sabah, the daughter of the Kuwaiti Crown Prince, once, after a two and a half months period of informal and corporate requests. This lack of information acted a lot more and nothing less than cerebral steroid, to get acquainted with my building, the Holiday Inn. This process demands a lot of give and take. There was a suspension of disbelief on my behalf, that everything I observe about this building, and everything that I sense of its presence should be taken further than a dash of subjectivity. The perception of this built mass is one of the main pillars of the development of anything related to the building. I am not the architect that presents himself as the savior, to me, the building serves an integrity beyond architectural intervention. This is the most intriguing layer to investigate, the silent anonymous power of an object, its power to inflict pain, “nausea”, excitement and melancholy. I decide my path, as the one allowed for me, for I am living in Beirut – with all its contemporary outlines and modes of conduct, and I am the default user of this monolith. 34

three Knowing that as an architect, I must not mistake myself as my user, which is something my ego would auto-pilot. For starters, I will accept this, during my first stroll around the Holiday Inn, I am the casual pedestrian – looking straight forward, average paced, as if I am actually going somewhere. Near the Clemenceau area, close to the large ground recess in front of the main bulk of the holiday inn complex, I am separated from the inside, via metal barriers, more than two meters high. This strip blocks me out completely, except for little gaps between the barriers, which are not visible on an average pedestrian pace. Another issue is that the sidewalk is less than one meter wide on that area, so it would be more logical to walk on the other side, a pedestrian would skim through the window showcases, I was spending much time watching my step between construction sites and holes in the ground. I could easily pass by without noticing anything. Towards the eastern façade of the Holiday Inn, is a very steep sloped sidewalk, with a comfortable width, but not a necessary or popular trajectory. The complex is still filtered by the same metal barriers, though at this point, the base of the building overshadows the presence of the entire complex, and standing there, I wouldn’t notice the 26-floor-high building even if I tried to. Reaching ExpoBeirut, and Phoenicia Intercontinental, is a very volumetrically inviting entrance to the building, although at this point, I could completely disregard the whole complex. The almost threestrorey-high entrance just draws you in, but its lack of proper maintenance along with the high density of security, drives anyone away. As a regular pedestrian, I wouldn’t have considered going into the street between the Phoenicia and the Holiday Inn, but for the sake of the perimeter, I would disregard this fact, and walk between one dry concrete wall and another pink blank façade to reach the Ain el Mreiseh district, where I would climb back up, behind a wall of almost abandoned residential buildings, with the Holiday Inn flickering between the extrusions every now and then, very insignificantly. If you are not fond of smelling exhaust, and trembling on holes in the sidewalk, this is not the best walk for you. It is only in the Ain el Mreiseh area that a casual walk would be interactive, because it relatively has a socio-economic activity on the ground level – the rest could be considered gentrified, to a certain extent.

I am back to point zero, my base start – but this time, I will allow myself to establish a channel between me and the building, a relationship that subsists because of the sheer value of mutual existence. The metal barriers are there, but now they exist between gaps, where I could peek into the ground level of the Holiday Inn. It is a vast recession from the street, where I am standing. There seems to be a complex relationship between the ground level and the underground, both in terms of circulation and spatial division. From this point, the ground tectonics are most interesting. As I walk towards the building where the Lebanese Canadian Bank resides, the steel barriers suddenly stop their iteration, and this time, the barrier becomes a concrete balustrade, around thirty centimeters thick, limiting the circumference of the ex-hotel property – an invitation to rest my hands and overlook onto my building. It reminds me of the cornice for some reason, the romantic melancholy of resting my hands on the rail, and looking onto the horizon. In this case, I am looking onto a mass, that is defining itself more and more as a reference, a landmark – a decaying non-architecture with clear barriers and frontiers devising my relationship to it. The two main buildings in the Holiday Inn complex form a spatial funnel that absorbs the walker, inwards. The buildings are situated increasingly converging towards each other that they propose an undeniable relationship that could be perceived as a massing focal point, but this volumetry is not linked to a programmatic precursor, if you get through the security, flooding inwards with the convergence, you are met with a steel gate, and the humble existence next to the Holiday Inn. I reached this point, one night, the closest point you would get – without breaking official security laws – I was two meters away from the Holiday Inn – looking up, to the sky – I could see nothing, but a vanishing concrete grid; pain, “nausea”, excitement and melancholy. I have to move on, leaving my viewing deck, around the curved corner leading down towards the Phoenicia Intercontinental and the Saint-Georges Marina. From this point, the Holiday Inn is rather exposed, completely, to the downtown area. Its wall along the slope downwards is also blocked by barriers, except for some places where there are blank stretches of concrete walls. It, being a war survivor, left these and most of its walls wounded with holes peaking into the forbidden interior. Peeping into these view-holes quickly became a habit, and standing now under the main ground level 38

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of the complex, I could sense the relationship between the grade and below-grade dimensions, with a rough, interesting theatrical light display, highlighting different spots of the underground, exposing the raw non-place nature of this arena. What I could see, from here, is a colonnaded open space, spanning on more than one level – a physically discontinuous visual openness. Looking in, crouching to adjust my head to the level of the viewpoint, I am thinking, I am really outside. It was never as obvious except when it was orchestrated. I have been told that I am not being allowed it, I have been physically shoved out of ‘entry’, but at this point, I realized, I am out. I move away from this hole, and I realize myself looking through a puncture, the hole now, just a hole, on a concrete wall, to darkness – inside. Although disappointing, this was a breaking point in the understanding of the Holiday Inn, the infliction of pain, the incentive to break in, something beyond reclamation – an awareness of existence. Continuing, I would reach the ExpoBeirut entrance. What interests me here is the multi-faceted nature of this façade, yet its inevitable kiss of death relationship with the pink wall. Besides being the entrance of the Expo, on the ground floor, there seems to be a set of retail space, aluminum shutters, under a curtain of hollow cube frames, extending in modular steps to form the façade. According to what I know of the building structure and program, this is supposed to be the mall and the Cinema Saint-Charles. For an abandoned building, the underground parking is rather active, for it seems that the Phoenicia Intercontinental is investing in this inoccupation of the Holiday Inn to flood into its infrastructure. In this alley, the junkyard next to the Holiday Inn plot is bound by a blank concrete wall that imposes itself to the spatial context. In this drift around the ex-hotel, I decide to walk through the junkyard, to be able to observe the western periphery of the complex. This façade is mainly a retaining wall, a huge blank wall to the neighbor. It makes you think of the nobility of the design, versus its honorary certificate of nobility because of its ‘modernity’ and ‘iconification’. This building, like its neighboring Phoenicia Intercontinental, is clearly disregarding its western edge. Any activity on the ground level from the lower site of the plot is visually and volumetrically challenged by the imposed gigantic wall. Any programmatic investment is limited on the ground level scale; this scale almost devising an exclusive right for another super-building next to it. From where I’m standing, the monstrous Holiday Inn looks like a sleek white tower, from the side. It, nonetheless, maintains its superiority over the context, despite its plain white color, and lack of ornamentation. Climbing up to Clemenceau, one could notice the referential aspect of the built complex. Its scale defines its context as a layer of variable perception, which is not exclusive to the perception of this Holiday Inn, but in this case, taking into consideration the human scale versus the Holiday Inn scale, on a steep topography matrix, the array of perceptions is significantly discrepant. 40

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picture taken from a construction site across the street (clemenceau)

This inconsistency in comprehension of the complex from the ground level produces an interesting parameter of viewpoints and observation points. To test the validity of this criterion, I decided to situate myself on a competitive sight-line with Holiday Inn. To do so, I accessed a near construction site, and took particular interest in the process of escalation and descending of the exo-skeletal cage elevator of the construction site. On the trip from the ground floor to the seventeenth, from the elevator, the Holiday Inn seems fixed. Going up, there is no perception of it fading away, or panning out of my sight spectrum. On the contrary, it becomes more flamboyant, and extraordinarily dandy as I go up. The whole context seems to sink, making room for this monolith. As I go up in the caged elevator, the Holiday Inn, instead of sinking into my birds-eye diaspora, gains more domination and thrust, appearing to be pushed up as the city descents. After reaching my seventeen-floor-high destination, the Holiday Inn becomes more transparent. Its majesty morphs into a huge screen, filtering the its Phoenicia Intercontinental and Marina backdrop. Its very rough image is literally pierced by the views across its rectangular grid windows. The huge block in the city is now a more porous tissue, not your usual colonization of vertical urban space. From this point of view and this state of decay, it is very clear; the Holiday Inn proposes itself as two scenarios, both equally valid. The first is the Holiday Inn, which could be read as an element in the city circuit, and the other is the Holiday Inn, the self-imposed isolation and dandy superiority to Beirut. This schism in reading the complex is directly reflected on the programmatic urban vicinity, where this tycoongenre property is neighbor to a strip of shoemakers and furniture menders. The holiday inn does 44

not claim a royalty, or a superior offset to its neighborhood; the gap in the scale of the co-existence is tremendous, although technically â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the Holiday Inn is failing to exist. This coexistence hints no more than an allowed joint holding of the natural dwellers of the space. This normally awkward relationship seems to be easily justified; the neighbors are not in competition nor do they rely on each other programmatically. A virtual fissure could be definitely mapped in this sector of the city. The intersection of Holiday Inn within margins of Clemenceau, Ain el Mreiseh and Downtown Beirut seems to isolate the Holiday Inn at yet another residual gap, adding to the problematic of its existence.

six picture taken from Starco center

seven picture taken from Platinum Tower

STRATEGIES OF ENGAGEMENT

Based on the above criteria, it is only natural to refuse a typical reaction / intervention to the exHoliday Inn. It is set on parameters of programmatic and managerial problematic, on a site that is being tectonically programmed to reject it – in its urban tolerance and functional potential, a Lebanese icon – owned by Kuwaiti royal authority. It is excavated from the heart of Beirut – strategically quarantined in home-arrest – out of reach of tangible perception. The so-called icon, the“iconified” object, cannot anymore withstand the glorious burden of a denotata outside its present corpse. This frozen state of rejection of the status quo raises the inquisition of the future of the Holiday Inn. The Saint Charles company seems to be a real estate management firm, not very keen on publicizing its mission statement. All there is to know of the fate of the Holiday Inn is that it is in pause, at least this is official response. The issue could hold a lot of speculation; the neighboring ‘knowers’ dwell on the dream of, “they-always-say-next-year”. It seems to have been going for a while now, the promise of the re-Holiday Inn. Another angle to the story is that the complex will be demolished to make way for a new development, the likes of the architectural entourage in downtown Beirut. 50

“The Self says to the Ego: ‘ Feel Pain!’ Thereupon it suffers and gives thought how to end this suffering” - Nietzsche A ‘standard treatment’ of the Holiday Inn would disturb its architecture. From the conservationist perspective, the only manner to redeem the glory of the complex and to harvest its accumulated identity is to renovate and restore it. This approach, in essence is an aesthetic attempt to reclaim the personality of the complex. It is at its core, a picturesque approach, with limited progressive potential. The mortality of the object is drawn in the invisible horizon, when it would jolt the building, into a studied ‘practical’ demolition. This approach leaves the Holiday Inn complex in another episode of ‘waiting’ its fate. Another ‘standard’ choice would be the instant demolition of the Holiday Inn complex, to follow the bandwagon of the construction boom in Beirut; the tasteless devouring of the residual built layer and replacing it with archetypes, based on imported style and economic practicalities. This is the worst case scenario, where the presence of this built is leveled to absence, leaving no trace of its existence, resetting the context into a corporate plot for a new building to occupy. Besides this being the worst case scenario, following the mainstream building logic in contemporary Beirut, it is the inevitable scenario – sooner or later.

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DEFINING THE OTHER

- HOLIDAY INN

At this point, it is critical to devise a standing point towards the status of the built via a framework that abides by its multifaceted context and its tectonic multi-polarity. Again, this is not a Noah’s archi-arc, and the purpose is not to save the Holiday Inn, this is an architectural approach integrating the semantics of the building within contextual parameters. It is the substitute of renovation and demolition; it poses the abandoned built of the ex-Holiday Inn as a progressive entity that could be subjected to an evolution of the built – questioning the fact-of-life mainstream shortcut to building. With this at hand, it is necessary to open the forum for alternative interpretations – to discuss different viewpoints of the Holiday Inn complex. It could be defined as, but not simplified to, a topographical extension of the Ain el Mreiseh tissue specifically, and the Beirut urban fabric on a wider scale. The fact that the Holiday Inn has morphed from being an architecture planned, built consumption with a specific program, to a ‘bohemian’ shelter during the war, passing through being the hosting fortress to one of the major battlefields in the Lebanese civil war reaching abandoned silence for more than thirty years allows a substitute relationship with the ground level. It has developed a formal and spatial root with the site that it could be validated as a welded chunk to the landscape. By acquiring this characteristic, the formula of designing a progression of the Holiday Inn could open up to a new analogy in design decision, most simply pinpointed as the analogy of the sloped site. When building on an inclined surface, an architect is –by default – faced with the question of site sensitivity and topographical reaction. There are infinite ways of dealing with such a situation, but for the sake of the argument, one could consider two cases: one being the excavation of the slope to create a flat plot with an appropriate ground level, or the reflection on the status of the quo and allowing a transparency to the architectural thinking. This appropriation of the designed according to site-offered-outlines could be applied to the Holiday Inn building. The design intervention could take into consideration the built as part of the site input, and dismiss the – now banal – differentiation between the site and the complex skeleton. This is facilitated in the holiday Inn because of the volumetrically interplaying ground and underground levels on the Ain el Mreiseh slope.

A different Holiday Inn, is Holiday Inn – the statue. In a survey The perception of Holiday Inn seems to be categorized mainly around the myth of the object. It is the ‘something’ in Beirut. It is not conceived as a building, but rather as a static object. This interpretation is interesting in the sense that the potential of the complex trespasses the need for it to be ‘umbilically’ attached to a program. It has been freed, in the mind of the people, from its architectural restrictions and situated in a more general category. Regardless, yet, of the constraints of the ‘icon’, its mere existence seems to be palpable. This sets the ground for the identification of the ex-Holiday Inn complex; the re-definition of its immaterial and possibly subconscious trace on the Beiruti. The acceptance of a building as a sculpture allows its perception as an abstract cluster – the possibility of a wider array of interventions and typological affiliations. It is Holiday Inn – the reference. To a certain extent, the Holiday Inn building becomes the pedestrian beacon. The prevailing power of the building is conceived – in most cases – from a distance. The impact of the presence of the complex on the pedestrian is stronger when it is further away; for the most basic reason that, as discussed before, the area of the Holiday Inn is not user-friendly – and the fact that as a common user of the city, one would not intentionally look up to ‘appreciate’ the vertical built. There is a definite ubiquity regarding the main 26-storey-building chunk of the Holiday Inn. It is visible from most of the active hubs of Ras Beirut, the Downtown and some parts of Achrafieh. It peaks through the dense urban fabric of this overlap-of-a-city, visible, but not standing out. Its scale imposes the bulk characteristics; at pedestrian speed, it is the backdrop of the city. When walking, it is the static background of the buildings drifting out of your sightlines. It is a forced companion, a discrete constant to the‘Beirut’experience. It could be defined as a large canvas, currently displaying an accumulation of events inflicted in and on it. To the cornice, it poses its slim side, where the main grid façade seems to glimpse through. To Achrafieh, the Western façade of the Holiday Inn is exposed, the master-grid. Its visual un-hindrance is continued towards the Tabaris area, where it starts to fade – shifting to the limelight only from balconies and roofs of buildings any higher than three stories. The Holiday Inn has an unobstructed view to the downtown area; the planning of the Solidere development is made to island it from the rest of Beirut via successfully dissecting vehicle fast-lanes with no pedestrian passages. This wide offset is located on the edge of the Holiday Inn, thus granting it a nonnegotiable super-façade – a pseudo-permanent visual eloquence to the most pretentious semantically saturated sector of contemporary Beirut.

URBAN PERMEABILITY

as seen from the American University of Beirut

as seen from the Corniche

as seen from Ain el Mreiseh

as seen from ‘Bubbles’ rooftop pub - restaurant

as seen from Saint Georges Marina Corniche

as seen from ‘Beirut Gate’ project ground

as seen from Zqaq el Blatt rooftop

photo by omaya malaeb 72

as seen from Wadi Abu Jmeel

as seen from Clemenceau

photo by Sarah Bayati

Saint Georges Marina

Platinum Tower

Monroe Hotel

Saint Charles City Center Holiday Inn Hotel

Bourj el Murr

Phoenicia Intercontinental Hotel

Saint Charles City Center Holiday Inn Hotel

Phoenicia Intercontinental Hotel

Platinum Tower

Achrafieh Saifi Village

Grand Serial

Platinum Tower Balcony Starco Complex

Zqaq el Blatt

Sanayeh Public Garden

Bourj el Murr Qantari

Saint Charles City Center Holiday Inn Hotel

American University of Beirut - AUB

Saint Charles City Center Holiday Inn Hotel

Corniche

AUB Beach

Phoenicia Intercontinental Hotel

Saint Georges Hotel and Marina

There is an obvious mis-achievement in rethinking the Holiday Inn complex as partial units in fractional layers of perception. It is enriching in the realm of giving each layer the importance in vitro, yet the methodology of the re-assembly of the Holiday Inn, in the analogy of a patchwork, is too pragmatic. Korzybski’s dictum, “The map is not the territory”, can be used to formulate a realistic array of understanding of the building. Any perception of the abstraction of the Holiday Inn is not the Holiday Inn. It is not the meaning of the building, nor the object, the topography or the canvasstatuesque. So when we talk of a perceptive take on the building, we are never acknowledging the same criteria. Our mapping of the Holiday Inn is based on a personal reflection off the building. “Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.” - Gregory Bateson Therefore, one cannot claim an assertion of the nature of the Holiday Inn. Tell me more about my icon. The building nests as a personal and a communal property, transcending a divine monotony. The Holiday Inn complex is an “iconified” object, it cannot be refuted. The iconography cannot claim its monogamous relationship with the Lebanese civil war, it would be an over simplification and a fallacy. The Holiday Inn, in the realm of iconography, is a symbol of the nonchalant and the banal as well as the passionate misery and fetish of epic milestones of personal and collective memory. It is the capsule of rain, wind and bacteria, and the longing of gravity to rejoice in the triumph of the collapse of the erect. An architectural intervention on the Holiday Inn should refrain from acting upon a cliché, an inevitable acquired fallacy – as opposed to investing in a fertile post-tabula rasa. The parameters being set to intervene on Holiday Inn, in a manner of mediation as opposed to a forceful shortcut are access, material, progression, semiotics and acquired identity under the umbrella of the dynamic context. As mentioned above, the issue of accessing and experiencing the building is at the core of the problematic of its existence. It is not allowed, or allowing at this status to interact with the human. In a more material dimension, recall the concern of expiry and decay – in addition to the sheer out-date of future functional need of – in this case: concrete – with respect to acknowledging the growth into a new purposeful space. To deal with the issue of progression, I would denote that one of the aims of this architectural inquiry is the need to set a design methodology that – instead of skipping the dilemma of the abandoned built layer of Beirut – would skip the ‘shortcut’ value of demolition and the assumption that aesthetic renovation and restoration serves as a conservative of the essence of the building. In terms of semiotic outlines, the stress on context in all its forms – physical and metaphysical – brings to attention the intersection that the Holiday Inn creates and its interpretations. The complex houses a notorious open forum on its past, present and fate. Because of its impact on the different scales of the person, the neighborhood and the city – on the corporate, the public and the ‘façade’, the issues of semiotics and acquired identity must be encompassed. Acquired identity, in this case entails the dynamic mutual relationship between the complex and its context – in a multitude of radii. It allows variables such as lighting and cast shadow be included within the design thinking. The identity beyond the formal logic is presented as an ingredient in the design thinking. 86

unpublished comic sketch by Haig Papazian

SYNTHESIS 3D COMPILATIONS To better understand the spatial characteristics of the complex - especially with the lack of architectural graphics that represent it, I compiled a 3D model of it by assembling information from aerial photos and pictures from different angles. It is an incomplete experiment - in the sense that is does not portray the building in a manner that is detailed enough to resemble reality - but it is helpful as a design tool, to push the discourse into a wider understanding of the composition of this structure.

PROCESS - MOMENTUM

This is a proposal of an extensively documented, experiential, serial decomposition and re -composition of the Holiday Inn complex as ignition to the procession of this architecture. This is not an intervention, per say, to reach an end of a process – for the acknowledgement of a process requires no perception of an end. Nevertheless, this is not a choreography of the absurd. With this, it is an attempt of architecture as an ignition, and adoption of a spatial momentum. The physical relationship with the Holiday Inn starts out as a manifestation of ‘the current’. It starts out by producing a series of viewing platforms as a network around the Holiday Inn building. Each platform would ideally have a separate access point – but maintain a superfluous connection with the other platforms in the network. Each platform will be a proposal of a viewpoint, a vantage perspective to the Holiday Inn Mecca. The platforms do not penetrate the building at any point. They are woven around it – to form a steel lattice of diagonal structural elements and plain platforms. At this point, the building is the focal point – it is the visual and intellectual destination, but it poses no invitation to the viewers. The object and the parasite, conform in silence. The hierarchy is clear; Holiday Inn is in the center – the focal point of the intersection of perspective sightlines from the platforms. The built is imposed, as aprogrammatic. The spaces being developed on the platforms bare no task. Their mere allocation identifies the object of desire – the building acquiring a new layer divine. From the platform, the user is put face-to-face with the outside-ness that he/she is forced into. There is an aspect to be questioned in this debate of the platform, the creation of new space. The nature of this space, in the realm of being public or private is open to discussion. It could be described as functionless, but not aimless. It is a built emptiness that serves a desired function, yet has the capacity to accept another layer, and the flexibility of an open forum exploitation. It is – in space – limited by its own boundaries. It is a controllable plot, a probable public utilization, with controllable access and a clear cut territory – in mid-air. It contrasts from the urban public allocations in terms of administration. The lack of the ‘public’ outlet in Beirut is mainly due to the inability to control the ‘public’. Sanayeh garden is a public garden by day, and locked plot by night. The sea cornich, a twenty four hour public zone is designed longitudinally, to control a minimum depth – six meters. The platforms around Holiday Inn could offer a controllable ‘estate’ to be invested in by the municipality, a rather brutal camouflage for the promised experience of the public space. The platform land, therefore, has an inverse interest in terms of investment. The priority is to the open-publicuse, developed to create a curiosity of the Holiday Inn. Any functional assessment of the platforms as lots, comes to the service of the public and the concentration upon the Holiday Inn qibla. 94

flying next to the Holiday Inn

image courtesy of Ryam Idriss

flying next to the Holiday Inn

image courtesy of Ryam Idriss

flying next to the Holiday Inn

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image courtesy of Ryam Idriss

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Division of a construction tectonic with a structural independency of the Holiday Inn building. Formation of a lattice of tension and conpression - a web of cyclic forces - the system is stable and can cater for additional structural elements as the platform network gets more elaborate.

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The abstract construction diagram is apporpriated into a system of elements and platforms. The system still does not demand a structural host, it is a viable network on its own.

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The system makes formal sense in context.The Holiday Inn remains its raison-dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;etre but not its barer. The Holiday Inn seems to nest within the system, only connected to it visually, semantically.

The platforms act both as space for the branching out of the city and as tools of documentation. Each platform is equipped with audio-visual recording devices. The center of this recording is the Holiday Inn building. In this occasion, the presence of the Holiday Inn is humbled to a possible future time-lapsed viewing yet magnified to the object of superdocumentation. This moment is best described as a breaking point in the existence of the building. It is being transformed from a myth to a reality, with the closer, more intimate relationship with the Beiruti. The invisible boundary between both transforms into a very much experienced limit â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the physical inaccessibility. But another limit is pierced, the user is invited to identify with the Holiday Inn in a personal manner. The building is being offered 108

from previously invisible viewpoints. It is being released of any visual preconceptions, thus in fact freeing it from the podium of the fairytale-divine; it is the vignette of the beholder. This web of platforms and documentation earns the discussion of its form, placement and aesthetic, having covered at least briefly its intended function. I would pose the dictum of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Form Follows Functionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to be a parameter in this discussion. But what is function? And if ornament was never a parameter in the design discourse, would this dictum be relevant? In the viewing platform weave, the function is derived from the intended relationship with the Holiday Inn. The function of the platform itself is open-ended. Is it formless? If taking the mere fact that the

voyeur is the function, this opens a wide spectrum of formal interpretations. It is only through a more holistic functional assessment of the built, that it could be sculpted into the indicated ‘form’. Still, this is not convincing – for the equation of form following function implies a pellucid solution to the aesthetic. Not going into the ornamental side of aesthetics, one could easily debate the functional rationale of the aesthetic, being by itself a functional element in the built. A more convincing approach would go into form following context; this context could be an assimilation of task-based and formal function. The platform network must ensure the feeling of engaged dichotomy between the Beiruti and his/her Holiday Inn. This is done via the experiential mode while the user is in the building, and visually, when outside, utilizing the exposure and volumetric of the Holiday Inn. In this line of thinking, ornamentation only hinders the main functioning of the building, and it is eliminated for doing so – after individual case assessment. The academic need to categorize brings out the genre of this built. It could be negotiated as being an installation on an urban scale, as opposed to built architecture. This should logically start by differentiating an installation art from the built architecture, in the raw form of both. An installation art is a work of experiential modification of a certain space/place to propose certain ideas and/or experiences. Architecture is more task-oriented, but does not deny the experiential modification it possesses. The relationship altogether is blurred; it is the mere rejection of architects to acknowledge a more raw form of spatial intervention on ‘their’ territory. In the case of the viewing platforms around Holiday Inn, it might be argued that the sheer fact that they are designed to be temporary is enough to render them installation pieces. But, any built is temporary – it is beyond the control of the architect, the client, and the investor. The problem of ‘permanent’ architecture is that it is based on a claim, and acknowledging its temporary nature is enough to argue the architectural simile of a designed ten year duration as opposed to a seventy year duration. In terms of architectural authenticity, it is even more contextual to build for a shorter duration of time, being more specific to that time-period as opposed to homogenizing for a multi-purpose flexible time capsule for the future, compromising sensitivity on transient layers of the context. The viewing platforms have an indispensable function, besides holding activities – programmatic or otherwise; they are recorders of the Holiday Inn. Their relationship is manifested in two types of media. One is the literal recording and documentation of the built via audiovisual tools, cameras and microphones, and the other is the perceptive recording, one that is grounded solely in the memory of the beholder. This relationship is more sensitive in terms of direct assimilation and projection on the spatial use of the city space. The question of allowance and boundary bending poses a catharsis within the brackets of the Beiruti-Beirut relationship. What was not allowed is not the center of attention, the curiosity of the forbidden tree is the generator of this spatial approach. The user is brought to the confrontation of the, once invisible – the staging is designed to disintegrate the need for a formwork of preconceptions. The Holiday Inn is presented as a built, it is displayed in modes for it to be perceived on an individual basis. It is no longer the fortress, the icon, the impossible – it becomes the center, the background, the definite. To achieve that, one must be aware that this defined relationship between the audience and the object is not the welding of these two elements. The purpose of approaching the Holiday Inn in such a physical manner is not to “befriend” it and come in terms with it as an existence, as a supplement rather than a complement of the user. This is done to set the ground for the bigger issue, the progression of the built – which could not be done before establishing a closure especially in the case of Holiday Inn. 110

Verfremdungseffekt is a concept developed by Bertolt Brecht, roughly translated as the alienation effect. It is used, in theater, to arouse the understanding of the audience that what they are seeing is an act, as opposed to real life. It is a shock, a gesture or a constant element that sets them in the correct atmosphere in relation to the staged. This technique is used to make people aware of the difference between the artificial and the real – a prompt to their lives. The theater permits this question of reality by offering the obvious fiction. In this context, there is a similar analogy that can be applied to the Beiruti, where the ‘everyday’ is the stage. There is an air of surrealism in post-war Beirut, one that is an intricately woven layer of acceptance of the offered mainstream with minimal resistance. The streams of real and unreal are very much intersecting, to an extent that any perception is filtered out, producing a ‘false’ series of conceptions of the outside world. The production of the viewing platforms, and the concept of recording – sensual perceptions – aims to alienate the building from its myth on one hand, and the user from the fairytale. It is through pain, “nausea”, excitement and melancholy that the user is invited to re-experience the Holiday Inn. For this, phase two is ignited. It is the materialization of the ‘material’. It is a manifestation of the mortality of the Holiday Inn, putting it in the realm of the temporary built. With all audiovisual recorders tagged onto the building, documenting it from every angle – the decomposition starts. This decomposition, unlike other demolition projects does not take the disintegration of the building as a necessary fact-of-life, making way for a new building as fast as possible, but on the contrary, aims to invest in this process of disintegration – a prolonged demolition of the Holiday Inn. This process touches on many aspects of the conceptions of architecture and the built – in Beirut in particular. It proposes this demolition as an experiential phase, one that admits the previous building and prepares for the next one, trying to blur each of the mentioned stages into one holistic state of continuous transience – architecture as process.

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The physical intervention begins by the three-dimensional tracing of the Holiday Inn. The building is reinforced with steel structural elements, encompassing the physical form of the Holiday Inn. The steel construction is used as a highlighter of the form of the built – an inverse-mold of the concrete monolith. This act of patching of the future void takes on the building in segments. It makes way for the beginning of the demolition process. The demolition, in this case, is a processional activity – so the structure would substitute the elements being demolished as the building disintegrates. In order to deposit a clear framework for this process, a clear timeline should be devised. In this case, an initial ten year proposal is put to question. This duration is both challenging to the normal lifespan of the inhabited built medium, posing itself as temporary, but still acknowledges the time needed to impact its context, and vice versa. As the building ‘fades’ the created void is bound by the residual steel lattice cast, tracing its former figure. This resulting steel trellis acts as the transitional leap from the old Holiday Inn building into the new built. It is the matrix where the next ‘built’ will be located. There exists a sinusoidal relationship between the viewing platforms and the steel matrix being formed. With the further diminishing of the ex-Holiday Inn building, the void becomes more obvious, and the perception of the fading of the built into a skeletal residue becomes more obvious. The viewing platforms then are to be connected in a manner that allows the entry within the void of the Holiday Inn. The audience is allowed into the fading gut of the building. With the slipping away of the building, the users are allowed into certain designated areas of the leftover, before – it too – slips away. A relationship of continuous in-achievement is devised, to drive a progressive attitude towards the built. The process does not give the Holiday Inn back to Beirut, it takes it away, recycles its consumed space into a temporary void, allowing the Beirutis to experience this documented digestion. As the decomposition continues, more video cameras and microphones are installed to document the process from angles that were literally non-existent before. The transformation is making way for the immediate production of new space, that is not empty space – it is a tangible product – the post-tabula rasa. 126

building being manually demolished - Hamra - Beirut

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experiment on methodology

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tracing a CMU block with a steel case - then demolishing it

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The post-tabula rasa contrasts the idea that the best ground for building would be an empty lot with maximum formal flexibility. In the case of the Holiday Inn progression, this issue is a main part of the design thinking. The Holiday Inn, physically and semantically consumed as increments in the production of the post-tabula rasa, the design matrix. The physical form is employed to set the literal transaction between the decomposing building and the next building. The viewing platforms used to ignite the process and engage the users within the development of the building are included within the design matrix. Zoomed more into the built structure of the Holiday Inn, the steel reinforcements form location-specific materializations. The programmatic arrangement of the context is taken into consideration to devise the relationship of this composition to the visual and physical neighborhoods. The design process questions architecture versus building, and building with respect to the human scale to form a site specific grid juxtaposition. The void is also a clear element in this ‘non-product-aimed’ process. It is neither a residue nor a product, but rather it stands as a main constituent of the design. The void expresses the change – it is the most obvious marker of progression. It is the absence of the Holiday Inn, yet the alternative presence. It is the ligament of this new matrix, without it – the lattice means nothing. In the design process, the void should not be mistaken for absence – it constitutes a spatial investment crucial to the reading and functioning of the project. It also adds to the cliché rationale of incompletion, which in this sense, plays an important role in the docility of the unfinished, and the constant strive to progress without being limited by the sole incentive of completion. 152

preliminary design procession

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personal photo album - shot in holiday inn - courtesy of zeina, AIF

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In parallel with this process, media is being accumulated in the audiovisual recording nodes of this network. There is a chunk of perception being processed as the project is being experienced – live – by the spectators and the users of the network. There is another point of view that is not yet exposed to be perceived by the public, the perspective of the machine. There is an interesting twist to machine documentation, that the footage is raw and un-interpreted. In addition to that, the viewpoints provided by the recording nodes are much more flexible in placement and framing than the viewing platforms, so it would be interesting to extrovert this hidden mass of documentation. The network turns into a recording machine, that utilizes its prime location and wide canvas facades to unleash a random, raw logic if its own metamorphosis. The action is shifted from the ‘observer of a consequence’ to the ‘viewer of an arbitrary designation of visuals’. Intersecting with the viewing platforms, the line of thinking of this progression is maintained to include an abundance of views and perspectives of the Holiday Inn. The built is now not defined by its physical limits because of the intervention of the virtual output, and this traces a wealth of experiential status to the process, in addition to an increasing archiving of the ‘now’. The process that has started as an ignition of the evolution of the Holiday Inn building is gaining momentum as an autonomous entity – at least in terms of its place in the city, and its interaction with its context. It has started as a statement of schism between the built and the context, to a voyeur relationship governed by thorough documentation of a slow inflicted decay of the building, to a self-recording process of transformation that manifests itself as a display machine. This acquired nature of the process opens the possibility of a programmatic intervention within this cluster of evolution. Given the sequential development of the building, the program is drawn within the outlines of its context. With the main function of the building, being to assess and evolve through process, the program must in turn be transient. It is also from the ongoing process of recording and projecting the ‘now’ that this program arises. Mainly for these stated precursors, I am proposing a program for archiving the current. The object of archiving is ‘the contemporary’, where no input of the past is welcome as material for archiving. This renders it more of a recording device as opposed to an archiving function. But this program is also derived from its lack; it branches to fill the gap of archiving the present, in raw format – a raw history machine. In a scope survey of institutions dealing with archiving media information of the Arab world, I have been interested in the Arab Image Foundation and UMAM. Each has its own distinct mission statement, with the Arab Image Foundation dealing with pan-Arab imagery spanning mainly from 1860 until the 1960 where archiving stops mainly with the start of colored photography, while UMAM preserves memory of civil violence and war to be documented and later discussed and manifested into dialogues and tools of study. I have not encountered a movement of un-interpreted documentation of the contemporary happenings of the Arab vicinity. And with literature being a definite interpretation of the writers’ views on topics, it is only through a recording of sound, video and imagery that one can refer to a neutral ground. Therefore, I am expanding the self-documenting machine into a fully functional Post-Contemporary Arab Media Archive.

The Post-Contemporary being the progressive key-frame of reference, defines the functioning of the archive. The archive feeds via audiovisual recording nodes that collect its information from different geographical locations. This real-time footage feed goes into the automatic archiving of the system. With this instantaneous input to storage trajectory, any media eligible to be documented within the archive should be less than one day old. Every type of media is welcome, from a first birthday of a twin in the Emirates to an amateur Moroccan threesome and recordings of the sounds of tycoon yachts hitting the dock in the Saint Georges Marina. The archive is intended to be a collection and documentation of the everyday; there is no â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;eventâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; per say â&#x20AC;&#x201C; there is no semantic juxtaposition beyond the obvious. The archive database is meant to be a raw log, where contemporary is a volatile description of the present. 176

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By integrating such input to the building, the context has flood within its infrastructure, where it is now a possible main-player in its composition. Here, it is interesting to employ Derrida’s text-context relation, where the context is literally being injected into the text, and altering its semiotics. The print of the context is materialized when recorded, and feeds into the text – the building. With this dynamic, one could imagine a reaction of dissemination – the building will react be re-seeding the context. The relationship between the building and the context could be bound by the formula of harvesting media via an open-forum type of interface to display the input and the archived haphazardly, investing in its prime unobstructed location and canvas façade. To do so, the building would be equipped with screens and projectors, so that it is submersed in this act of visual dissemination. This display skin resolves the need to disperse the visual archive to the context, but maintains the audio material unresolved. To tackle that, bearing in mind the need to uphold the raw factor of the diffused media, the building is equipped with an FM broadcasting utility. This will ensure the transmittance of the audio input into a dimension much farther than the geo-location of the building, widening its contextual affiliation. The Beiruti would be able to walk on the cornich, look at the demolition of the Holiday Inn, a canvas for raw archiving – listening to an unsynchronized stream of sounds from a portable radio. Sitting on the sidewalk would be a legitimate public intervention on any property that overlooks the ex-Holiday Inn. The process resituates the meaning of context by defining and reshuffling the activity in its radius. The development of the functions in the current building raises a fertile ground for a defined program. With the backdrop of the Post-Contemporary Arab Media Archive in terms of designation and collection of information, the proposed program would be one that would manifest an exploitation of such information. A fully fledged media, archiving and broadcasting facility is being put forward to serve as a visual library as well as a media production unit, a television and radio broadcasting station.

MEDIA ARCHIVING

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The media archiving unit feeds on the audiovisual recording captured by the source nodes on the building and around the building. It is an archiving system that accepts information no older than one day as viable input. The point of doing so is to reclaim the present tense as a core issue in progression. The material in the archive would grow as old as the archive is needed physically and virtually. The building, with the transcending of the physical presence into the virtual dimension of information, devises a certain flexibility of progression, no longer a formal grounding of its concept, but rather maintains itself through its ability to morph and evolve.

DISPLAY

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The presence of the archiving unit poses a need for a site of extroversion. Because the material is media-based, its communication could happen on two layers, the visual and the aural. The prior discussion of the exHoliday Inn in terms of location within visual reach and in-obstruction to many areas in Beirut offers it as a canvas / screen with illustrative access to a large mass of people. From this combination of functions, the display faĂ§ade is born, giving way to the gregarious built mode of communication. The display arena is a dynamic set of fragmented planes and projection spaces that randomly portray the inner workings of the archive. The display is not set within limits of time or category â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the display material is chosen randomly by a machine. The random factor is crucial to the display function, because in itself is a liberation of interpretation. Individual perceptions of order and play-listed archives add a professional choreographed layer to the rather instinctive life of the city in the form of raw footage. Besides the visual dissemination via projection screens on the building, there is the audio layer of documentation. With the aural layer of projection, it is tricky to emit the sounds clearly and efficiently without loss of quality and disturbing the neighbors. Another drawback is the small radius allowed by the sound emissions to be audible, for so, the program includes an FM broadcasting unit. This unit, similarly to the visual display, is random. The process of receiving input and projecting it outwards is not a thinking process. It is also not synchronized with the visual projections, adding to the loyalty to the juxtaposition of the building versus the city versus the human. The presence of the broadcasting unit inverts the conception of shrinking the radius of the audible areas, to the extent that the presence of the building exceeds its location in modes of perception.

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SENSUAL INTERFACE The richness of the information being stored in the archiving units devises as much means as possible of experiencing the data. This poses the necessity of a visual medium, a library that is a categorized collec- MEDIA PRODUCTION tion of the material. It is the starting point of perception and utilization of the raw. A huge archive and media storage is being developed within the premises of the buildThis space is a library for visual and audi- ing. The sources of information are vast and ble. It does not rely on the handicap of the diverse, being the located nodes as well as senses to function, or their lack of need to the receiving of miscellaneous information on perceive the subject matter, but it excludes a daily basis. This information focal point bethe interception of a third part interpreter comes a strategic location for a media editing of the documents. The primary percep- and production facility. It utilizes the existing raw tion of the material is considered the first material and allows its personal interpretation. interpretation of the media. It remains the first interpretation in the cases of all It is the workshop of information, where it funcof the users of the library. It does not get tions on a non-destroyable type of system â&#x20AC;&#x201C; meanexhausted by the number of people as ing the original media is not tampered with while opposed to the number of repeated inworking. The user is invited to use the whole docuterpretations by the same interpretation. mentation potential of the building to produce the desired media. To advance in the function of meThe material is accessible for research, dia production, the program will include recording entertainment and processing. The studios for sound production and flexible studios function of the library poses a spatial for film recording. The spatial aspects related to alternate to the library, where all the such studios will be based on the steel lattice creinformation is readily accessible to evated by the decomposition of the Holiday Inn, thus eryone at the same time, in soft copy. acts more of a black box type of studio/ theater. The distribution of information should be through outlets to the main core, These spaces are also spaces of theater and a live-stream turnover of media data. live performance, with a flexibility of producing indoor/outdoor and hybrid spaces. These programs are all internal byproducts of the building, but are also kept under thorough documentation via a growing network of recording nodes.

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TELEVISION BROADCASTING The ability to thoroughly process and produce information within this growing hub draws the attention to the quantum ratio of media diversity. This needs to enlarge the outlet of the exposure of the media being collected and produced, thus the idea of a television production station unit. This unit depends on both the raw footage and the processed graphics and sounds as material to be broadcasted. Its validity is highlighted by its source framework. It is a streaming nonfiction processing of audiovisual information. Its presence significantly pushes the bar of communication where the offering of yet another dimension of perception is being executed. The building continues to exist without its presence. This is not a weak point in its existence, but rather a reinforcement of its transient presence and functional potential.

photo by abed kobeissi

THE GROUND FLOOR The ground level of the Holiday Inn cannot be defined as a simple clear-cut ground level, or level zero; it spans four levels maintain its ground characteristics. It has two main references, the upper one near Clemenceau and the lower reference near Phoenicia Intercontinental. This ground complex has been occupied by the ex-Holiday Inn for more than thirty years, and for most of this period, being simply abandoned, the area became a non-place, somewhere that does not exists in the urban expression. Now that the physical format of the exHoliday has morphed into something that is at times more flexible as a progressive matrix, there is a huge void in the middle of a territorial intersection that is no more an isolation as opposed to an opening up of the areas to each other. This poses an important issue of ground occupation – the private/public territorial a struggle versus the programmatic intervention.

“…the ground is very significant therefore the organization of the plan on the ground is very critical and that implies ultimately and organization of infrastructure which could be very interesting and lead to a penetration of space and accessibility which is not permitted through the old organization of infrastructure systems in cities ... it implies a much more fluid and accessible ground which could house many programs and it should not necessarily be a zero - it could be on many levels and still relate to a public domain” -Zaha Hadid

The ongoing infrastructural network being produced by the building and offered to the city as a communal ground for negotiation is an interesting aspect to integrate within the ground level. But the ground level in this location, by itself, is a multi-polar site with a vast spectrum of intervention-ability. It relates to the Phoenicia Hotel on a security and a programmatic level, where the Phoenicia Hotel security consider the façade of the Holiday Inn as their responsibility and the administration of Phoenicia Hotel use the underground parking of the Holiday Inn as their own parking space. The connection of Holiday Inn to Ain el Mreiseh is more visual than programmatic, but with this freeing of the land, the very human scale part of the neighborhood would easily flood into the space in an appropriative manner – an economic ignition. The connection of the Holiday Inn to the Clemenceau area is not very bound by people-scale functions that could flood into it, but exposes the local craftsmen located on the upper periphery of the land to a possible market outlet. The downtown Beirut façade of the Holiday Inn is the most exposed but still, most taboo of the rest. It has no functions for interaction, but rather had a wide traffic boundary limiting pedestrian cross except at points further away from the complex. This elevation exposure should be resolved because it – in itself – has qualities of showcasing and a large sidewalk outlining it that could facilitate the human-built relationship. The ground floor of the Holiday Inn could become a public consumerist pole where a phenomenon similar to the sea cornich could occur, with the cosmopolitan hustle and bustle of buying, selling and hanging around. The transformation of a virtually dead strategic point to a crowded venue raises the demand for such an exposed transaction tectonic, thus the ground floor could hold a potential for income through property rental allocations as it becomes an incubator of an urban tectonic. 188

upwards funneling and reshuffling of the ‘ground’

THE STAKEHOLDERS - PROGRAMATIC

The foremost and most obvious user of this building/process is the pedestrian Beiruti. It is this person that will be able to create an individual interface and relationship with the built as spectacle. The pedestrian will be the most affected by the process, where walking around Beirut – as an experience – will be drastically changed by the dynamic momentum of the ex-Holiday Inn. The perception of public space in the city, such as sidewalks and benches as well as private exposed spaces such as roofs and balconies will be altered. The average flaneur will be able to take a pause, sit on the sidewalk and watch the ex-Holiday Inn as it gets demolished, scrambled with a haphazard set of footage and images projected on the dynamic face. The pedestrian would also have access to audio with the same logic via a specified FM frequency, also transmitting audible archiving unsynchronized with the video footage. This experience is not a literal attempt to experience the real Beirut, for there is no such thing – it is a city much more complicated to define – if there is such a way to define the ‘real’ in a city. The attempt is to achieve a common ground between the 100% real and 100% abstraction; an analogy of reading the negative camera films. The camera films are media where there is no tampering with the raw exposure of the film to the light – the only time the viewer intellectualizes and edits the negative is when it is looked at. It is exported from the ‘out’ and printed in the perception spectrum for instant processing. Another important actor in the process of this building is the Arab Cultural Deposit. This concept of recording the Arab media into a Post-Contemporary collective shifts the mainstream Arab melancholy in the arts into a present-based conceptual framework. This catalyst for work is also the collector of the produce, thus it performs an active role in the production cycle. The media industry is also at the top of the food-chain when it comes to benefiting of the role the Post-Contemporary Arab Media Archive plays in the cycle of production. In this sense it becomes the source of information, a Reuters of raw Arab documentation. An inverse relation is also possible where the footage is inserted within the Media Archive before it is processed and edited for presentation. The economic zoning of the spaces, mainly of the ground floor open up an investment type of activity within the system. The activities that would be allowed are ones that put the experience of the public at their priorities. The significance of the location is an automatic attraction to every possible investor, from market stalls to amusement parks and pubs. 190

PROCESS ATTRIBUTES AND DISCUSSION This process touches on more than one critical aspect of living and producing post-war Beirut city, as well as its integration within a wider Arab context that would dissolve its local representation into the definition of their nation, Lebanese. The direct surrounding will be affected by the immediate change in the utilization of space, where the audiovisual layer of the ex-Holiday Inn adds on to the everyday static, a dynamic layer capable of reforming the context. This contextual dynamic could be able to solve part of the problem of Solidere, the mall phenomenon. It is a claimed downtown area of the city, appropriated as a pseudo-public, private outdoor mall. As a drifting pedestrian, you would not feel very free in downtown Beirut. The offering of the ex-Holiday Inn as an interactive focal object – observed from a distance – demands an urban audience platform, the residual – or public space. Because Solidere is offered the most dominant and unobstructed view of the Holiday Inn, becoming a primary public place is just a matter of time. The pedestrian will have a clear reason why he or she are sitting the way they are, where they are – audience of the literal process of architecture and spatial perception. Besides becoming a socio-spatial reformative hub – in terms of experiencing the city, the project touches on the lack of proper Arab Archiving. The initiatives are on an almost domestic level, with no synchronization between archiving units, nor an interest in the present as material to be studied or recorded. This process is an extremist of the contemporary – it is a recorder of the now, without any molding or formwork – a progressive Arab Media volt. The public is integrated within the project in an alternative approach. The design is not a design for the public, there is no public design to start out with. The architecture proposes a mixture whereby the public domain or public mass is implied as a main component in the evolution of the built. There is no public zone, but inclusive public element. It is an opposition to the public sector, composed of a designated “square-meterage”. The architect is not a designer of the personal instinct of the flaneur to achieve personal space, but instead, the architect is the proposal of nodes of interaction – hubs where the city dweller, regardless of being categorized as public or private, can succeed in identifying a personal relationship within a shared dimension. The building – as progression – allows this kind of interaction with the people of the city by offering a processional interaction, allowing a limited physical appropriation as well as a visual interaction and a functional program – all in constant flux. Every sidewalk connecting visually to the building could be considered its illegal extension. The functional boundary of the ex-Holiday Inn is defined by its impact on a wider spatial Beirut city – unlimited by its own physical composition. Going back to the initial structure of this process-architecture, the built is temporary. The structure of this built is defined as physical and virtual – both designed to be exhausted, not glorified or preserved. On one hand its virtual dimension – memory and recording – could be displaced because it is not a physical entity to start out with, while the physical construction is a dwelling upon an open-ended matrix; thus maintaining a relatively unlimited combination of spatial configuration. The building of the structure, from the start, admits its functional dynamic – and inevitable transience. It is a building that is equipped to progress from its preliminary intervention. Still, there remains the question of the validity of context in the design discourse, which is to a certain extent the major problematic of this discussion. What is the context with respect to

design – and what is the role of the architect in the design procedure? An architectural commission on a site, in mainstream professional practice comes packaged with the program. The client presents a site and a willed program. It is framed in such a way that the architect is the execution of a program on a site – an interception in the design process. The site is not assessed for its programmatic fertility – yet in the design ‘process’ the architect portrays a valued interest in the site-plan-based site analysis, a damage control. Throughout this design investigation, the importance is given to the site as a potential of its own. Its analysis leads to an intervention, that does not describe itself as architecture, installation, art or performance. It is an initiative program where the only viable source of development or programmatic growth comes as a byproduct of the engagement of the building with its context. The program comes later, only when the dynamic site-context relationship is charged enough to a complexity that is called an architecture program. The program here arises as an assembly of fragmented complexities and needs to harvest active nodes within the progressing built. It is literally a ‘building’, a constant act of building, decomposition and assembly within a constant relationship with the rapidly transient context. The dichotomy of site and program is an unacceptable factor in a design process, the program is not an element to be allocated on a site; the site gives birth to the program, which in turn becomes a site for progress and growth - inflicting pain, “nausea”, excitement and melancholy.

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REFERENCING BIBLIOGRAPHY Debating Ground Zero Architecture and the Value of the Void by Sarah Boxer for the New York Times September 30, 2002 The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster By Lawrence J. Vale, Thomas J. Campanella Published by Oxford University Press US, 2005 Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and Post-war Reconstruction By Samir Khalaf, Philip Shukry Khoury Published by BRILL, 1993 Nausea By Jean-Paul Sartre, Lloyd Alexander, Hayden Carruth Published by New Directions Publishing, 1969 Thus Spake Zarathustra By Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, T. Common, O. Levy Translated by T. Common Published by Plain Label Books, 1967 The Future of the City by John Colenbrander, Maziar Afrassiabi, Sam Basu, Shahin Afrassiabi - Paper submitted to the 20th International Federation for Housing and Planning (IFHP) congress on the future of the city. Copenhagen 2007 Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics By Alfred Korzybski Edition: 4 Published by Institute of General Semantics, 1958 On Line: Less Aesthetics More Ethics 7th International Architecture Exhibition Citta: Less Aesthetics More Ethics Expo Online published by la biennale di venezia, 2000 With/Without: Spatial Products, Practices and Politics in the Middle East Edited by Shumon Basar, Antonia Carver and Marcus Miessen co-published by Bidoun and Moutamarat, 2007

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Notes on the Art of Selling Cities: Urban Design Strategies in the New Downtown Beirut. 2004. In Architecture Re-introduced: New Projects in Societies in Change. By Jamal Abed Bidoun magazine issue 02 fall 2004 ‘We are old’ Sowar Magazine issue 00 vol 01 june 2007 CASE STUDIES JANOS MEGYIK - the forms of emptiness

KRYZSTOF WODICKZO - chair drawing

GABOR BACHMAN - the architecture of nothing the design of the entrance of the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;96

MARK SHEPHARD - tactical sound garden http://www.tacticalsoundgarden.net/ an urban networking project that allows an open forum usergroup to plant sounds in the city using their portable laptops with a WiFi modem.

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FURTHER ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to also thank Rym, for the random doses of Adobe for Architects, for so I must also thank Amani and Nour for their patience - online and offline. I sincerely thank Zeina from the Arab Image Foundation for trusting me with her personal Holiday Inn album, since, until now, I have not been admitted in. Omeia, thankyou for snapping some shots before the darak pulled you down, and Bayati for the best domestic stills ever. Abdallah, thank you for reading and reading and re-reading - and Jeremy thanks for the kickass pep-talk.

All photography and media are by Raafat Majzoub unless indicated

2008-2009