Studio Beirut Announces its 2nd International Summer Workshop: Rescripting Beirut - Aug 15 to 29 2008

Studio Beirut offers its second international workshop
for architects, graphic designers, social scientists,
urbanists, artists, and related disciplines in the
arts and sociology. This workshop, extending over the
last two weeks of August 2008 will address the topic
“Rescripting Beirut.” In conjunction with the
commission Studio Beirut has received to produce an
Alternative Guidebook to Beirut, we propose research
and design projects to confront the obvious lack of
spatial history in the region, to revive and reassess
the past, the present and the future as they manifest
themselves in the spaces, the narratives and the plans
for reconstruction and development that proliferate in
the city and nation. Areas of the city that have now
been leveled by war and real estate will be
reinvestigated and interventions proposed to revive an
awareness of their ongoing history. Wadi Abu Jamil,
the old Jewish Quarter, or Northern Saifi, the
traditional red-light district a “behind the bank”
could be examples, but the city, transformed by
conflict and development, abounds with such charged
and undocumented zones. Research and active creative
proposals will be seen as one synonymous system
implemented by the directors and the many instructors
along with the primary contribution of the
participants in the workshop.

This will be the second such endeavor. In the summer
of 2007 the first Studio Beirut Workshop confronted
the topic of “Public Space”. The participants came
from ten different countries including Saudi Arabia,
Italy, Russia, Slovenia, Jordan, Egypt, Ireland as
well as the Netherlands and Lebanon. They were
architects, landscape designers, social scientists,
artists, linguists, and urban planners. The
instructional group was as diverse, again drawn from
many countries and including a range of disciplines
from political science to fine art. The pace was
frenetic, with the participants preparing responses to
three exercises given by the directors as well as one
given by Partizan Publik, one from the Studio Beirut
team and one from the group of social scientists
attending.
All these formed a dynamic symbiosis in conjunction
with a dense series of daily lectures, two symposia at
the Order of Engineers and Architects and three field
trips: all in less than two weeks.

The concept was that the group, from its many
disciplinary perspectives, would intensely perform
investigation into the potential to reinvent public
space as a concept and as a physical fact in a city
and nation where its current existence is ambiguous.
This, of course, had direct political implications.
Design and research in this case could not be
separated and were required to engage radical societal
criteria. Space became a metaphor for culture and it
will continue to be so in the upcoming workshop.

The Municipality of Beirut provided sites on which to
work and a senior official attended the presentation
of the participants work on the last day of the
workshop along with several members of the regional
planning commission. This interaction with
administrative bodies and citizens was essential the
intention was also to reach out, engage, and affect
institutions and attitudes in Lebanon. Studio Beirut
aims to always have this double role, as an extremely
active center focusing on myriad activities and, at
the same time, as a generator of wide cultural ripples
reaching out to Beirut, to Lebanon and to the region
and possibly having impact even in the Netherlands
where the radically different ways that things occur
and policies manifest themselves in Lebanon may
generate new practices.

If fact one of the great values for a group
predominantly from Holland and Lebanon was the
exposure to the other culture through the processes
engaged in at the workshop. The many lectures and
presentations attempted to provide information and,
more emphatically, critical models for discussing that
information. This was the point, not to feed the
participants predigested ideas and images of this very
different and complex place, but to give them the
tools to generate their own. To surprise and overturn
the conventional view of things; to question those
imposed from outside by all the agencies and
organizations that come to Lebanon with their notions
of what and how it should be described and improved
and likewise to question those offered by local
entities who have their predetermined notions of what
and how. We hoped new ways might evolve through the
process of deep immersion and immediate intervention.

The implications of these workshops are many, but the
events may unfortunately largely remain an intense
educational event. For it to do more so, for it to
engage the complex spaces and practices that define
Lebanon, to raise awareness and implement change,
finally it is essential that there be the active and
definitive participation of Lebanese individuals and
institutions. In all its future activities Studio
Beirut will remain a forum for discussion, research
and action. The active generation of events in and out
of the Studio will be a primary goal.

Join us this summer for the second, concentrated
exercise in putting these ideas into practice. Join an
enthusiastic group of participants and committed
instructors and contributors as we dig beneath the
scraped wastelands of easy and self-serving
interpretation into the convoluted fabric of this
ancient modern metropolis. Participate in making
proposals, formal and ideological, that address our
cultural excavations. Join us, for “we are not out of
breath.”