Architecture
Project: Cadavre Exquis Lebanese
Program: Research, Planning, Exhibition, Utopia
Location: Rotterdam Biennial, The Netherlands
Team: WORKac
Year: 2007
After the Lebanese Civil War, a public-private consortium called Solidere is formed to rebuild downtown Beirut. Squatters are expelled, mines cleared, buildings deemed significant are restored. Symbolic public spaces are rebuilt or created by celebrity architects. However, instead of an economically renewed, shared social ground for the country's multiple populations, the reconstruction of downtown Beirut leads instead to its privatization and Disneyfication, replacing what was once a bustling mix of people and unedited buildings with a polished and controlled image of its old nineteen thirties self; one that does not represent nor include the country's vast middle and poorer classes.
It is only in 2005 with the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri (the founder of Solidere), and the massive demonstrations from all parties that followed, that Downtown Beirut reacquires its status as a symbolic center. This position is further confirmed by the summer 2006 Israeli-Lebanese war ? in which hundreds of thousands of refugees occupy the heart of the city - and by recent anti-government demonstrations and permanent occupation of the center's public spaces.
With the evident failure of burying difference, conflict, surprise and complexity behind a clean and simplified narrative, we propose to re-create Downtown Beirut as a temporal Cadavre Exquis. Building on the surrealist tradition of setting up processes that engender situations rather than reducing the city to yet another instantaneous master plan, we propose a sequential series of possible 'epochs' whose final combination constitutes the "Cadavre Exquis Lebanese," a fictionally re-created complexity willed into being through the power of the imagination.
