Pre-war, mid-war, post-war.

A pin in time and the collective consciousness, a point of reference for everything and anything; without war, everything is lost.
War, to us, is a concept that we never understood and that fades further and further as time goes by. The passage of time is finally swallowing most traces of that war: the city of Beirut is crystalizing this transformation. Pre-, mid-, post- buildings have been absorbed by the metamorphosis and this story of war is being surpassed via erasure, erection or renovation. However, massive pre-war artifacts within the city’s urban fabric, participated in Beirut’s morphology, while being totally absent from its programmatic structure. The Holiday Inn, El Murr Tower and St George’s hotel are stagnant monuments inherited from that period. Participating passively in the city, they are masses of void, literally and figuratively. They represent a very specific period in time and history that no longer addresses us.

The project questions the presence of these massive voids, as they are, what they represent; and investigates a potential intervention. An intervention that would reclaim their role in the city as protagonists; converting them into active devices rather than mere buildings.