1276 words
14 September 2007
Daily Star
English
(c) 2007 THE DAILY STAR, BEIRUT, LEBANON.
Beirut -- BEIRUT: In 1934, Nicolas Barakat's home stood finished: a bright yellow, four-story building that dominated the corner at Damascus Road and Independence Avenue. With sandstone walls, colonnaded verandas, high ceilings and Art Deco floor patterns, it combined elements and materials of both East and West, old and new. It was an architectural reflection of the era's cosmopolitan sea changes.
When the Civil War erupted four decades later, the city divided along that very street, with Christians to the east and Muslims to the west. It was the Green Line, a no-man's land where bullets fell and only trees and shrubs were safe, growing unchecked into the streets along Beirut's new faultline.
Many of the bullets came from that bright-yellow building, which Christian militias occupied and fortified during the conflict. The cement walls and sandbags of what some say was Beirut's most fearsome sniper's nest still remain - an architectural reflection of a different age.
Today the war-scarred building stands as a monument to the beautiful and bloody turns of Lebanon's history. When its owners moved to demolish the building in 1997, local architects and heritage activists fought and won a campaign for its preservation. Five years ago, the city bought the property to be restored as a museum of Beirut's history. But political turmoil and renewed violence in Lebanon have since stalled the plans and the building's future once again stands on uncertain ground.
When Youssef Aftimos, a renowned Beiruti architect who designed the capital's Municipal Building, began the Barakat Building around 1924, he was known for his Mauresque style - an Islamic architecture of curves and arches that was popular in the later days of the Ottoman Empire.
When the project was finished 12 years later, after a second phase of construction by another architect, it retained Islamic architectural features in its sandstone walls and interior arches. But it also combined classical and Western features, including a geometric facade with colonnaded verandas and a taller, four-storey structure. The building's high ceilings, yellow color and the use of concrete are all elements of what came to be known as the Mandate period.
"The outside of this building is very classical," says May Davie, a professor of Beirut's urban history at the Academie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts. "It has nothing of an Islamic aspect at all. But the domestic life, the [interior], is very oriental, very Beiruti."
Instead of the pointed arches of traditional Eastern design, the Barakat Building's triple arches are concrete-sculpted, rounded and modern.
"This is why it's interesting. It's a transitional architecture. It's a transitional period," says Davie, an early advocate for the building's preservation. "Culture is not something you just create new. It's a reinvention of the old ... The Mandate period was very creative. These people were artists ... This is why we did all we could to keep it."
But in addition to blending archetypal influences, the building added something unique: a central bay behind the corner colonnade that stretches deep into the interior. Rather than showcasing an impressive parlor room on the corner - a typical architectural boast - this stylistic innovation opened the building up with a majestic transparency. Its effect gives every room inside a view of the street.
"It's a more democratic use of space," says local architect and heritage activist Mona Hallak. When Hallak first explored the building in 1996 - its corner treatment had impressed her as she drove by - she was moved by the quality of the sunlight, which filled the central bay and made the stone walls glow. She continued up the stairs to see the city stretch out beneath and beyond the corridor's void.
Inside she found remnants of Art Deco motifs around the marble floors and walls painted pink, yellow, green and blue. It was there, as well, that she found the sniper's perches - thick walls riddled on one side with bullet holes. From the opposite side, snipers had fired through three small rectangular holes aligned beneath the ceiling's triple arches. With a view of the street - and a line of fire - from every room of the building, the gunmen could nest in these dark recesses while commanding the street corner from virtual obscurity.
When the Barakat family prepared to tear down the building the next year, Hallak joined the chorus of architects and heritage activists calling for the city to stop them. Real-estate prices in the neighborhood of Sodeco Square had skyrocketed after the war and the owners wanted to sell the property. Hallak helped to mobilize the group's effort to preserve it, circulating petitions, running ads in newspapers and reaching out to politicians. Ultimately they succeeded, which left the question of what to do with it.
Like others, Hallak agreed that the museum should showcase Beirut's 7,000-year history. But unlike some, she didn't think that it should shirk from portraying the dark and violent cycles of that history.
Hallak grew up in Beirut during the Civil War and her father was wounded in the shoulder by shrapnel from an explosion. But having never lost anyone close to her, Hallak says she experienced the war from a distance.
But she remembers one episode clearly. As a girl, she watched on television news as bystanders tossed a rope to someone crumpled by sniper fire in the street. The sniper could have shot them again, as Hallak recalls. Instead he shot the rope.
"It was to show he was in control," she says, adding that she often imagines the scene might have taken place at the intersection of Damascus Road and Independence Avenue. These are the memories Hallak says she wants others to confront, from a time when the city lived in the grip of fear and those who wielded it as a weapon, so that it doesn't happen again.
Hallak has big plans for the museum, including a design competition and fundraising campaign for the restoration work, the construction of an adjacent office building to bring in rent and the establishment of an urban design unit to review development projects in the city.
But she also wants to keep the sniper den.
Preserving the sniper modifications as part of a "museum of memory," as she describes in a color pamphlet that outlines the project, would make the restored building "a place for meeting and reconciliation, a space for Memory so as not to be swept up by amnesia."
When a glossy banner with a life-size image of the restored Barakat Building was wrapped around it this spring, it announced the site would host a "Museum of Memory," the first indication, she says, that her vision could become a reality.
But first the restoration plan needs to be developed. A contingent of cultural advisers from France were due to visit last winter to help in the project's planning. But the outbreak of an opposition protest in the fall, then the battle at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp starting in May, has pushed the group's arrival back indefinitely, says Hallak.
For now the building sits in limbo। On one side is an illustration of its early splendor, a brilliant yellow to which it could again aspire. Behind the wrapping paper is its bullet-pocked reality - a reminder of another potential fate.
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