by Cristina Bianchetti

Beirut City Center Recovery: the Foch-Allenby and Etoile Conservation Area, Robert Saliba Steidl Publishers, Göttingen - Solidere, Beirut 2004 (pp. 286, s.i.p.)

As Sennett writes, in times of instability and uncertainty, people have a tendency to concentrate on the details of daily life, trying to find clues on how to deal with more general issues – a bit like ancient priests inspecting the entrails of sacrificed animals. That we are living in times of instability is obvious. It is also obvious that we have been concentrating on details in order to explain the changes going on.

Our attention has been fixed on the kind of small, repeated, introverted shifts that generate a change of scenery like specks of dust moving en masse. See the minute substitutions being made in our urban fabric, see the one-family homes and their interchangeable arrangement in spread-out cities, see the forms that molecular capitalism takes on in different places. There has been a kind of hyperrealism giving us the task of fully describing the contemporary city. “To define” has come to mean “to expand”, and it is unclear whether this is for excess of imagination or lack of it. The reasons for this behaviour are probably to be found in our evident cognitive disadvantage when faced with transition.

This is what has produced the innumerable amount of inventories, classifications and atlases in recent years. They have most assuredly enhanced our knowledge of contemporary places, but they have done so in a very particular way, producing (among other things) the deceiving impression that change only comes about in this way, and that large urban transformations are less relevant than they were in the past and that they are completely different from small ones.Robert Saliba’s book is the tale of a large urban transformation in a city on the Mediterranean. It is an important transformation for its spatial, economic and symbolic connotations. It concerns the area of Beirut surrounding the streets of Foch and Allenby, as well as the Etoile area, the city’s monumental heart, also delicately interconnected with the infrastructure of its port.

It is an area of transition that the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) has turned into a desert of rubble. Here, reconstruction is the signal of a larger transformation that flows through the entire country. It is a wager that cannot be lost, although it is difficult to say exactly how this type of wager is either won or lost. The transformation has been entrusted to a private construction company called Solidere, specifically and lawfully instituted for its task in 1994. Solidere plays a leading role in the reconstruction, as well as being its director. The company is financed by those with property rights in the area. The idea is to turn an economic transaction into a shared investment sustained by a broad range of participants.

In an unequivocal way, the existence of the company shows the convergence of the main parties (politicians, technicians and financiers) towards the realisation of a project with a profile that might not be the summit of inclusiveness, but is well defined and committed to quality control. The guideline of the reconstruction is fidelity to the past, from building to building, starting from the skeletons of the structures that are still standing. The basis for the project is a flexible urban rehabilitation plan for an area that covers 185 hectares, to which another 60 hectares of new waterfront have been added. It is clear that there has been great mediation between the “flexibility strategy” (based on general principles) and the desire to preserve the local atmosphere through the use of specific materials, craftsmanship and traditional ways of building. This is seen best in the abacuses of windows, balconies, facades, cladding and architectural details. It makes for surprising results.

Types of urban renewal that were developed in the 1920s and ‘30s have been executed following today’s methods for the re-weaving of urban fabric, using a mixture of the traditional and the modern that is very unusual for Beirut. It is done in an era that has given modernity completely different looks. This time-warp aspect is possibly the most curious of the whole operation, even more so than the redefinition, as celebrated in the book’s photographs, of new spaces for common use that have been somewhat simplified and changed into new public spaces. Seeing as urban transformation generally functions like the woven threads of a fabric, its character is to have no end, to continue to move ahead by the virtue of its substantial ambiguity (the same ambiguity that a space has when it is incessantly adapted to circumstances over and over again).

But the world of transition that Solidere has taken charge of is guided by rapid and definitive (for now) conclusions. So now the main question stemming from the Foch-Allenby renovation is this: what exactly is being built in this area of Beirut and why? The answer can only partly be deduced from the book, which speaks through the voice of Solidere (and of course its author, Robert Saliba, scholar of Lebanese architecture), which is to say the institutional side of the restoration. But it is evident, even from the institutional point of view, that what is attempted in these imposing and neatly aligned facades along the wide streets of Foch and Allenby, is the reconstruction of a civic and cultural identity, the business centre of a city that was a central location along the Mediterranean in the 19th century.

An icon is in the making, and through it, a symbolic capital, an urban site of great impact driven by communications and competition. When the Foch-Allenby project is described as exemplary in taking advantage of opportunities and situations with origins in different directions (legal, financial and technical), innovating them and regrouping them in a coherent and strategically sound scheme, it describes a problem, not a solution. It would be wrong to enclose the mutation in a single issue, bound only to the presence of will (strong, weak, conflicting or convergent). It would be wrong to read it as the following up of an intention instead of an effect (one that was never really understood or wanted) of a multitude of issues.

A bit like trifling details when their effect is only in sheer numbers, without taking into account that the space is full of dispersions, diffractions and refractions, continuously subjected to curving and bending, full of unexpected and unavoidable black holes. These are challenges that are not aptly faced by inventories and atlases, no more than they can be understood by means of beautifully illustrated operations of large-scale urban renewal.

Cristina Bianchetti Professor of Urbanistic at Polytechnic of Turin