Beirut 001

Date: 2019

Materials/Medium: 3D model of Beirut in 3dm Rhinoceros 5.0 format.

Size: 697 MB





In the midst of an environmental, economic, and political catastrophe, my barber in Beirut complains:

“(They) don’t let you live and (they) don’t let you die…”

In this state of eternal purgatory what will architects do, when building is a nauseatingly violent act?

When need — not desire — is trivialized, can we still risk believing architecture to be part of the solution? Can we continue to obediently inhabit the pristine renders we produce? Can we still naively imagine change without disobedience? Or that disobedience is enough to bring about change?

Beirut 001 is the first readily available digital 3D model of Beirut.

Mapping buildings, roads, bridges, and tunnels, and constructed with the humble means available to the architect and his team over the span of three years, it is offered to the public today as a preliminary tool to collectively re-imagine our city.

What will we do with it?

Will environmentalists use it to simulate micro wind patterns in the city and suggest new electricity rationing schedules to reduce air pollution from the informal power grid?

Will activists map the 2000 CCTV cameras illegally installed in the city to find a potent space of protest?

Or will cartographers inscribe into layers long-forbidden urban information?

Is it precise enough? Or should surveyors make it more accurate and share it again?

Will politicians advertise their pictures or will they broadcast their visions on the most exposed corners they find in Beirut?

Will developers locate an empty site or will they finally realize that sites are never empty?

Is Beirut 001 the first of many? Will students and other architects expand its boundaries to other cities, towns, villages, suburbs informal settlements, and camps to cover the entirety of the Lebanese territory?

Might security forces devise mechanisms to further oppress its citizens or would they map new ways to protect them instead?

Will emergency services use it to assess potential natural disasters and develop plans to minimize casualties?

Fellow architects could render it as a backdrop to impress clients, or would they rather choose to use the model to redraw the city in the new space generated by this revolutionary moment?

What will you do with it?