INVENTED LANDSCAPES

Postulates in the Lebanese terrain between land and space

Similar to many cities around the world, Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, is witnessing rapid urbanization that is leap frogging its municipal boundaries, consuming land at a rapid pace. Characterized by a peninsula jotting into the Mediterranean Sea with limited land expansion, the city is exceeding its land carrying capacity, reaching high build-out. This is resulting in expensive real estate pushing uncontrolled parcel development into the abutting mountain slopes; in the hope for more affordable real estate. This process is resulting in complete defacing of the landscape and architectural character of the mountains with high implications on ecology, wellbeing and aesthetical value.

With more than fifty percent of the Lebanese geography as elongated mountain chain against a thin coastal strip, it is expected that building regulations and zoning plans would address this design problematic. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The boundaries thus of what is the city has vanished. The process of building on the mountain has severely disfigured its natural morphology, through radically cutting and flattening the slope to incorporate non-characteristic, multi-storey concrete buildings.

The workshop will consider several prototypical crops of land, taken vertically in section from several regions across the Lebanese mountain chain in the vicinity of Greater Beirut, and will attempt to modulate in each scenario a new approach to forming, both land and space.

The objective is to explore and identify a potential typology of spatial design interventions on sloped parcels of land to direct development of the City of Beirut towards meaningful ecological and social strategies.