ARC3020Y F
Instructor: Lina Ghotmeh
Meeting Section: L0111
Tuesday, 9:00am - 1:00pm, 2:00pm - 6:00pm
 

Background

Trauma can be defined as a wound, caused by a supposedly “external” action. Yet in the era of the “Anthropocene”, human’s action over earth has triggered a shift in the eco-systemic balance of the planet. With the human-made mass exceeding the overall living biomass on earth, our world has been facing a multi-faceted crisis — environmental, economic, social — topped by a sanitary crisis whose causes could be correlated to the “systems” of making and inhabiting our environment. These events have affected and continue to transform our daily life. They transform our perception and understanding of spaces. We are brought to question the role of public spaces, the quality of our private habitat and the way these interrelate to our “milieu”… while spaces of interactions have been put under high restriction, uncontrollable events have changed our scale of time and our relation to permanence… leaving many of us with a profound need to find refuge in nature.

As we look for a strategy to deal with the void that this landscape generates, we wonder how we, among other living beings, will we be able to live together in the near future? How can we compose with uncertainty and devise new strategies of making? What are our resources when we have consumed the ones at hand? What role can we, as future architects of matter in this world, play and what are our tools?

Context

The explosion that devastated half of the Lebanese capital on the 4th of August last year had exponentially intensified these subjects in one geography of our planet. At the edge of the Mediterranean Sea, in an area dedicated to commerce and at the heart of a city that lacks much green grounds, grain silos, warehouses and whole living quarters had instantaneously been transformed into rubble. Grains had filled Beirut’s port’s ground with fish brutally tossed off the sea. Few seconds after the blast, no material other than earth seem to have existed and the contours of the sea had taken a new shape. With these smoky images, one could think of the world’s largest wastelands or of Piranesi’s persistent etchings…

There again lay a traumatized landscape.

While invoking a potent void, such landscapes solicit notions of time, memory and material. They hold a potential for change. They also bring with them new questions and invite us to think of other substantial ways of making and inhabiting our environment.

More specifically in the port area of Beirut, the disaster and the absence of governance had generated a tactical approach to “repair”. Young architects, students, citizens had appropriated the streets adjacent to the explosion site. They cleaned the roads as if cleaning their own verandas, gathered waste to transform them into resources. Most of shattered glass was melted and transformed into household items… A collapsing economy and a fraught system became an opening, as modest as this might be, to an alternative way of owning and making the city.

The Studio

In this context, during the first Semester — the Research Studio — we will be leading both a theoretical and a hands on research. We will start by having a look at the personal meaning each one could develop of post traumatic landscape and then proceed in defining a matrix of related themes that will structure our research. We will try to understand the spatial dynamics of the port of beirut, its history, tackling specific parts of the city and dissecting the ground of the port through its mere physical caracteristics. We will hear from professionals, students, urbanists, architects on ground, establish contact and catalogue our findings. We will also look at the site as a matter per se, as a ground; exploring ground and waste on ground as our only matter of making, looking at techniques and processes of building, carving, voiding, rebuilding. We will learn from our research to build our experiments and endeavor into a process that will resemble an Archeology of the Future.

In the second semester, our consolidated narrative research will allow us to project a future and encounter with more precision the site of the devastated port of Beirut. Our “Ground Work” experiments will allow us to shape spaces of encounter with nothing else than the sea, the land and the “ruins” left in place.

Travels: If the situation permits we will travel to Beirut. If not a city relevant to this theme will be set as an alternative.