We Design Beirut: Architecture Amid Conflict
ملخص
r/Lebanon shares a look at We Design Beirut, a design fair highlighting Lebanon’s architectural optimism, glamour, and grit amid drones and air strikes. The story challenges conflict-only portrayals of the country and spotlights the region’s design intelligence.
Architectural Optimism Is Alive & Well in Lebanon. We Design Beirut showed off the country’s glamour & grit in the face of drones & air strikes
Architectural Optimism Is Alive and Well in Lebanon
We Design Beirut showed off the country’s glamour and grit in the face of drones and air strikes.
Text by
Jack Balderrama Morley
Published by
Dwell
This story is part of Fair Take, our reporting on global design events that looks up close at the newest ideas in fixtures, furnishings, and more.
I did not want to go to Beirut. I was tired from working on a book all summer, and I wanted to stay home and rest, not fly halfway around the world to go to a weeklong design fair that was putting me up in the Lebanese capital. Design press junkets can be the kind of thing where some PR person whisks you off to a very expensive building, and then you look at the building and nod and say, yes, this is a very nice building, and then they serve you a very expensive lunch, and you nod and say, yes, this, too, is very nice, and then you go home having learned what, exactly, you don’t know.
For a moment, I considered backing out of the trip, blaming it on the State Department’s Level Four travel warning: "Do NOT Travel to Lebanon due to crime, terrorism, civil unrest, kidnapping, unexploded landmines, and the risk of armed conflict." Yes, sir! The news stories we see in the West about the country depict it almost exclusively as a place of explosions and war. That could be enough to stop many from going. But, thankfully, I try not to let the U.S. government direct my decisions, and the design fair, called We Design Beirut, was not only unlike any junket I’ve been on, it showed me how deeply American media and institutions have failed to understand the region and its design intelligence, to our loss.
One of the clichés about Lebanon is that it’s a land of contrasts—you can ski in the morning and lounge on a beach in the afternoon; you can be shopping at Hermès when the city’s power flickers out, as it often does—and this actually rang true on the trip. The fair’s organizers shuttled press and VIPs around a packed schedule of events, and the tonal contrasts among the de...
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