August 5 - 19, 2017
Led by Ziad Jamaleddine
As a sequel to last summer’s Beirut, workshop Hamra Street, A Case of Urban Resilience, this summer’s workshop will focus on ‘invisible’ modernism in the city of Beirut: the unfortunate modernist buildings that did not survive this very same war and economy. The Invisible Eight are modernist era buildings that under the pressure of conflicts, were neglected, deserted and vacated, yet they are still comfortably sitting, fixed in time, among their constantly changing neighbors. The workshop aims to map and document those modernist buildings. The objective is to reconstruct, through drawing representational technique, their birth and demise, uncover the physical and spatial backbone that failed them. The final output will be one large continuous collage oblique drawing of Beirut, plotting (and imagining) in it the invisibles, making them visible again. Produced by the students as a group the drawing will be exhibited at the Arab Center for Architecture, Beirut.