Building Yacoubian, A Social Biopsy of Modernist Architecture

The two-week workshop culminated in two interpretive axonometric drawings of Yacoubian building, capturing it in a moment in time: August 2017. The drawings are conceived at a 1/75 scale, that does away with the architectural understanding of the building as a freestanding object. From afar, it operates as a small city. At a close distance, it performs as a continuous interior: the building is a frame for furniture and other domestic elements. The drawing aims to meticulously capture the small details indicative of the massive concrete slab building’s ad hoc transformation. Apartment unit cut-outs reveal what the facade sometimes cannot: the historical and social depth of the building’s occupancy. A third drawing lays out the total building material quantities in one three-dimensional metric diagram. Here, the weight of the concrete and rebar forming the initial frame is balanced against the array of light architectural units accumulated by the residents.

The once exclusive stand-alone Yacoubian building on top of the hill slowly made its way into Beirut’s everyday architecture; no longer an outsider, or a copy of western modernist architecture as it was believed to be. Surrounded by the new city towers, it almost appears small and familiar. 30 years of violent war history of the city of Beirut, interrupted by pockets of peace, have tamed the Yacoubian building and integrated it into its context. The generous 3m tall ceilings and13 m wide by 150 m long concrete slabs host an evolving microcosm of Lebanese society through contradiction and sameness, militarized socialism and vicious capitalism, but above all through the war.

The Workshop attempts to to capture this architecture and its history.