Sections2

Welcome to Sections2, where we highlight the very best section drawings from architecture and design students from our universities.

Beirut Year Zero: Shifting, Shielding

On August 4, 2020, a devastating explosion hit the Port of Beirut at 6:07 pm. With shattered glass raining down and covering the streets, glass is blamed for causing the majority of recorded injuries and deaths, as well as a new phenomenon of anxiety – glassophobia (Daronboz, 2020).

Before people can trust glass, how can we curate a trauma-informed paradigm that provides emotional safety and empowers emotional expression reacting to glassophobia?

This thesis does not aim at curing, but exploring a shielding and narrative system in response to individual perceptions of different phases, materialising the intangible trauma of glassophobia.

In the light of devastating explosion of Beirut in 2020, this project explores a shielding and narrative system in response to individual perceptions of different phases, materializing the intangible trauma of “Glassophobia”. The system will be facilitated by celebrating the ancient Arab art of storytelling – Hakawati. Viewing the shifting shelters as a lens of storytelling will provide inhabitants with responsive levels of shielding in different phases, updating the narrative of “trust” as an indicator of the shifting reality and accelerating changes underway.

ZHUOQING LI is a recent graduate from the Master of Architecture degree at The University of Melbourne, where she also completed her Bachelor of Design undergraduate degree (Major in Architecture). Enamoured by the pursuit of narrative architecture, her work focuses specifically on engaging the storytelling techniques with the spatial quality of architecture. For her, architecture is never static and has its own narrative life.