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Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK The Journal of Architecture Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjar20 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Rafiq Hariri's New Beirut Richard Becherer a a American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon; Iowa State University , Ames, Iowa, USA Published online: 22 Aug 2006. To cite this article: Richard Becherer (2005) A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Rafiq Hariri's New Beirut, The Journal of Architecture, 10:1, 1-42, DOI: 10.1080/13602360500063089 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602360500063089 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the Content) contained in the publications on our platform. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon; Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA The images accompanying the rst reconstruction project to appear after Lebanons sixteen- year long Civil War are seductive indeed. The unabashedly modern urban life depicted within the projects promotional images is peaceful, orderly, afuent, leisurely. While these labour-free images of Beirut quietly sidestep the issue of money, the fact of the matter is that this rst reconstruction project did nothing less than to obsess over it. Money lay at the heart of this project. For without it, how would the war-ravaged economy replace 1200 damaged or demolished buildings, sanitise a 60-hectare toxic waste site, and replenish 150 hectares of city, in what would be the worlds largest urban renewal? The much-vaunted answer has a familiar ring to it: privatisation. And Raq Hariri, Lebanons billionaire homeboy made good was just the man to do it. The rst step entailed Hariris agitation as Lebanons new Prime Minister virtually to give the city centre to a new development corporation optimistically named Solide` re. The states event- ual payback would issue from prot on sales of its properties and income generated by the site. The government would also underwrite a public offering of shares in this company, a subscription that would capitalise the company to the tune of more than one thousand million dollars, making it the largest corporation by far in Lebanon (and one of the largest in the Middle East). And in order to attract other investors, Hariri would leverage his nan- cial reputation by himself investing in the project, as would virtually all of Hariris family and key business associates. The Lebanese government together with its Prime Minister would be invested in the publicly traded company, thus ensuring government oversight. Today, Lebanons once-vaunted privatisation programme is regarded contemptuously by most economists who have downgraded Lebanese treasury and corporate bonds to junk levels. For the truth of the matter is that Solide` re, still Lebanons largest company, has not truly privatised, and does not truly growout of the free market. Instead, it epitomises a com- plicated public/private arrangement, less partnership than Faustian pact. The private sector holds the public sector hostage as its private fortunes are equated with the governments. Meanwhile the public sector does what it can to protect its investment and to damage- control the activities of its business model and the worlds perceptions of the Lebanese marketplace. Neither public nor private, Solide` re epitomises a hybrid economic world whose viability is fundamentally dependent on huge infusions of state capital, public reven- ues that might otherwise serve other unsung sectors of the economy. Tacit state guarantees also encourage proigate scal irresponsibility, fraud, croneyism, monopolism, and excess 1 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 #2005 The Journal of Architecture 13602365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360500063089 D o w n l o a d e d
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expenditure that further draw down the states meagre resources, explode its national budget decit, and atrophy the civil state. For the state to call Solide` re a day would be to admit the failure of its economic centre- piece as well as the defeat of the very modernist social programme that propelled the project in the rst place. Whats more, to leave Solide` re incompletea ruinwould be to acknowledge the futility of Lebanons dreams for social and economic reform, a reality which sadly this part of Solide` res story serves but to illustrate. A. Picturing Beirut Beirut. August 2000. After a vote of no condence in the government of Prime Minister Salim El-Hoss, the city prepares for the third Parliamentary election in four years. Political campaigns in Lebanon, it has been said, are second only to those of the United States in terms of their cost and extravagance. Evidence of this: the city is festooned with political posters, their images oating through the air like so much ticker tape. Candidates impress their por- traits onto particular sectors of the city, quarters that each knows to be partisan, to be a location of support, of clientele. For instance, Walid Jumblatt, a Druze MP and long-termMinister of the Displaced, surfaces among the households of his people in Ain El-Mreisseh. Nabih Berri, de facto head of the Shiite political party Amal and current Parliamentary Speaker, pops up six storeys high on an apartment block in Beiruts Shiite Southern suburbs. Salim El- Hoss, the current Prime Minister, commands four oors of Beiruts storied Hotel St. Georges, still in ruins after the Civil War (Fig. 1). Hosss setting is signicant for it confronts the great expanse of terrain controlled by his political arch-rival, Raq Hariri. And Hariris turf is a seeming desert located upon what had been Beiruts city centre, a new urban development known by the acronym Solide` re (Fig. 2). Solide` re, the economic and spatial entity, is almost single- handedly controlled by Hariri. Indeed, the Hotel St. Georges is noteworthy in this place as the only parcel of land attached to the city centre not owned by Hariri or his proxies. And Hosss image on this outlier building makes this political point about property ownership for a knowing Beirut electorate. To Hosss parry comes Hariris thrust: a similar kind of gigantic poster just a stones throw away, in one of the citys most beloved locales, the Mina or sher- mans port (Fig. 3). What makes Hariris seaside entry to the battle of political adversaries remarkable is not so much that his image is positioned in a special spot (much as Hosss). Rather the singularity of his image stems from the fact that the poster actually captures photographically the setting in which it is so promi- nently displayed. As it does so, social reality and political imagination, life and art, telescope one into the other. And what might candidate Hariri hope to gain from the obvious spatial and experiential blurring he so deftly orchestrates here? How might this particular political image function for him (Fig. 4)? Most obviously, the picture operates by collapsing the real space of the port into the ctive space of 2 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer D o w n l o a d e d
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the photograph. Specically, the photograph takes as its pictorial context the port itself, complete with shermen, boats, nets, and its line of seaside dwellings. And centered among these is a local land- mark, the prominent nineteenth century yellow house, upon which Hariris face actually settles. Inci- dentally, signicantly edited out of the photograph is the forty-storey luxury apartment building bordering the Mina, a structure that most Beirutis see as del- ing the port, improbably nanced by a bank owned by none other than the candidate himself. With this potential political embarrassment eliminated, the image colludes with its setting, making the place seemingly picture-perfect, and the photograph, picturesque. Hariris implicit authorship of the poster is signalled by a three-quarter portrait, his face turning in a panoramic survey. If so, then photo- genic setting and its principal internal viewer, Hariri, enter into a visual pact, viewing this place across a certain mighty subjectivity, and making this place real. More importantly, the port and its community are attered into believing that it is being actively observed, and, therefore, that it is of political value. By insinuating itself into the Minas affection, the visual rhetoric of Hariris image rings out over and above the general political din raised by Salim El-Hoss and others embroiled in Campaign 2000. The image of Hariri viewing the port captures a complex subject/object relationship moving back and forth between the pictures centre and edge. Is the focus here on the place or is it the person? Which one has the power to see? And who sees what? Does the gaze of Hariri, arguably Lebanons most powerful man, valorise the place, or does the place behold the candidate, investing him with its own power? With its reexivity, the picture provides a succinct and telling illustration of the places incipi- ent clientelism, and the long-standing relationship between the patron (or zaim) and his supporters. 1 By situating himself within this place beloved by all, Hariri instructs the quarter, the city, the nation: Invest me with your collective electoral power, and I will in turn represent your concerns. You guarantee my interests, and I will in turn protect yours. Quid pro quo. The image foregrounds the political advan- tages to be gained as each party in the political pact safeguards the interests of the other. At the same time, the clientelism inhabiting the image also 3 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 Figure 1. Salim El-Hoss: political poster suspended from the Hotel St. Georges. (Source: The Daily Star, August 2000.) D o w n l o a d e d
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4 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer Figure 2. Solide` re, aerial view. (Source: Solide` re Annual Report, 1998.) D o w n l o a d e d
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5 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 Figure 3. Political poster of Raq Hariri in the Mina. (Source: author.) D o w n l o a d e d
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presumes that any political advantage furthered by either client or patron comes with something at stake. With every asset, be it political, social, or economic, comes a liability, with every promise a debt. If the port does give its allegiance to the can- didate (and the very existence of this image in the port suggests that the Mina is prepared to give it), then the candidate must be prepared to do some- thing for this place. That is, Hariri must do more than exploit the ports picturesque potential for enhancing the value of his own property. Current political propaganda notwithstanding, Hariri had in point of fact been privately confecting his own images of the city for years. 2 And part of this imaginative project develops from the fantastic function that the city had long played in nourishing the young mans mental life and forming his political identity. Beirut becametheOther for Haririthat is, all that was different fromthe hometownwhere he grew up, the provincial port city of Saida in South Lebanon. As Paris is for my children, so was Beirut for me, the candidate recently admitted in an interview with a colleague of mine at the American University of Beirut. 3 Beirut was all that was glamorous, foreign, Western. 4 It was Orientalism in reverse. 5 Hariri spent the beginning of the War abroad in Saudi Arabia, where he amassed his fortune working for the Saudi Royal Family, becoming one of the worlds wealthiest people. 6 Returning to the city in the late 1970s, he found it devastated, a shadowof what it had been, a far cry fromthe fan- tastic place he had dreamed of as a child or known as a student at the Arab University. Almost at once, he set to the monumental task of rebuilding the capital city, a mission that took shape in many designs over the next fteen years. There can be little doubt, as I will show later, that these projects capture to some degree the imaginary shape of Hariris remembered city. They also privately con- soled him. Affecting though these designs may be, however, it warrants emphasising that one persons site of promise may well be but anothers location of pain, one mans imaginary, anothers symbolic. 7 To understand the sometimes conicting 6 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer Figure 4. Detail of 3. (Source: Fadi Nassar.) D o w n l o a d e d
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agendas set into motion by various of Hariris city reconstruction projects, some critical background is in order. B. Beirut: a Western Orient I begin with a few words as to the genesis of the Hariri-sponsored Beirut Central District, or BCD, reconstruction. As is commonly known, Lebanon was shaken by a Civil War that began in 1975 and continued, in varying degrees of intensity, until 1990 (Fig. 5). The conict claimed 150,000 lives by conservative estimates. 8 Damage to the country was widespread and profound, but nowhere more debilitating than in Beirut, and no place more devas- tating than in the citys commercial centre. From this stricken heart of Beirut issued that most notorious of battle lines of the Lebanese Civil Warthe infamous Green Line sited on what formerly had been the Damascus Road. This spatial demarcation (which took its new name from vegetation encroaching upon the unused roadbed) has established itself for many as the spatial and psychic boundary separ- ating East from West, Christian from Muslim sec- tions of the city. The causes of the War are complex, and its political consequences have irrever- sibly altered the city of Beirut and its people. I will address these issues indirectly during the course of this paper as I focus upon the processes and designs of Beiruts city centre reconstruction, and the manifold modalities of social representation deployed in the projects major iterations. I am especially concerned with imagesimages that give shape to critical locations of Lebanese culture, images that simultaneously project and obscure national identity/ies, images that serve to attract and distract a desirable marketplace at once, images that construct and deconstruct one-Self. Zygmunt Bauman has stated that the political nature of modernity, and its enlightened will to order, is distilled into the colonial impulse. Modernity is for the East, the tunnel at the end of the light. 9 That light is the light of enlightenment, and it orig- inates in the West. It strikes the Orient like a spot- light, operatically staging the places prominent performances upon a luminous centre stage. Alter- natively, other supernumerary features are lost in the shadows cast by this brilliantly Occidentalised East. The light we observe today at the end of Lebanons tunnel vision has been shaped by centuries of colonial occupation, most recently Ottoman, from the nineteenth century to the end of World War I, and French, from 1920 to 1941, the so-called Mandate period. In November 1941, the country broke ranks with its Vichy French administration, declaring the moral bankruptcy of its colonial occu- piers, and claiming its independence and sovereignty. Ottoman and French rule oversaw the early mod- ernisation of the city of Beirut, eventually turning it into the Middle Easts major nancial and commercial centre. Memories of Ottoman dominance persist in the BCDs largest historic structure, the Serail, today recongured (by Raq Hariri himself) as political seat and residence of the Prime Minister (Fig. 6). And the French presence lingers, most prominently perhaps, in one of the city centres most notable urban set- pieces, the Parisian-style Place de lEtoile, garnished with a healthy dollop of Tony Garnier. Public modern- ism is paralleled in a private project like the Hotel St. Georges, mentioned above, designed by Antoine Tabet, a Lebanese student of Auguste Perret. 7 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 D o w n l o a d e d
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8 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer Figure 5. War Damage in the Beirut Central District: Souk Sursock. (Source: Ristelhueber, Beirut, 1984.) D o w n l o a d e d
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9 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 Figure 6. Serail. Present-day appearance after reconstruction: in the foreground, monument to Riad El-Solh in Riad El Solh Square. (Source: personal.) D o w n l o a d e d
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Despite the persistence of outspokenly modern forms like these, the postcolonial was accompanied by a quiet attack on Western modernity itself. 10 For instance, projects like Willy Sednaouis Piccadilly Building, while showing an afnity to Le Corbusiers abstract and aloof Pavillon Suisse, also remakes the paradigmaticallyHighModernbyperverselyabsorbing it into the city, appropriating and contaminating Corbus vacant ground oor with nothing less than an Arab souk (Fig. 7). The Postcolonial Modern in Beirut seems implicitly to travesty essentialising Western modernism while illuminating ways in which its prescriptions might be both dethroned and radica- lised, that is to say, postmodernised avant la lettre. 11 When it came to sketching rst thoughts on the new shape of Beiruts BCD following the Civil War, I initially saw the French connection persisting here as though nothing particularly unusual had inter- vened. It was business as usual, or so it appeared. In equally familiar fashion, the light at the beginning of the tunnel emanated fromLa Ville Lumie` re. 12 The French-trained Maronite architect Henri Edde , a partner and lead designer in the Middle Easts largest architectural rm Dar El-Handassah (a Hariri property whose global investments include the Chicago architectural rm Perkins and Will) trod, it seemed, a time-worn path (Fig. 8). 13 Others too have seen it in this way, particularly as his project was roundly criticised for taking its inspiration from older colonial models (like Beiruts classic Place de lEtoile), and for uncritically resorting to such trademark French planning devices as boulevards, rond-points, and scenic vistas. Forms like these seemed to many useless and obsolete spatial effects and unnecessary urban spectacle. Furthermore, it was argued that such planning devices were simply inappropriate formally, standing in stark con- trast to the casual intricacy of the Centres centuries- old street network and densely-packed historic building fabric. The foreignness of the projects inter- ventions immediately met with the criticisms of Edde s contemporariesarchitectural regionalists like Assem Salaam, Jad Tabet and Nabil Beyhoum: the URI group. They also, however, emboldened a new post-War generation of architects (like the informal group calling itself Plan B)mostly trained in the United Statesto produce their own decidedly contextual brand of site-specic urban response. Criticism arriving from both quarters led to many public meetings, then to televised Parlia- mentary debate. The immediate consequences: a second, and equally unsuccessful Edde scheme, and then a new project by another hand. Before proceeding to these, I would rst like to turn to a number of images from the rst Edde design to discuss in more elaborate terms why this project seems so foreignwhy it seems particularly e trange. For me, its strangeness has to do largely with the degree to which Edde s buildings despite their purity of shape, modern construction, curtain walls, and their omnipresent allusion to transparencyseem so typologically opaque. In short, why do they seem so tight-lipped, so uninfor- mative? My commentary also has to do less with the way that Edde s architecture exists in fact as the way that it is staged and therefore constructed to be viewed. There is little doubt, I think, that a very considerable amount of wishful thinking and fateful doubling goes on in this project. As noted above, the great boulevard that opens to the port 10 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer D o w n l o a d e d
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11 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 Figure 7. Willy Sednaoui: Piccadilly Building, 19657. (Source: author.) D o w n l o a d e d
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(a high-speed thoroughfare obliterating the historic Burj, the historic space where independence was declared) seems equal parts Pariss scenic Champs- Elyse es and Los Angeless efcient (and progress- ive) Harbor Freeway (Fig. 9). The twin-towered World Trade Centre advanced by another of Edde s images mimics its ill-fated big brother in the Big Apple. Such explicit formal quotations serve here to recharacterise Beirut in prominently Western, that is to say, High Modern terms (Fig. 10). And out of this Occidental resemblance evolve at once a visual legitimation of a re-emergent Lebanese state and economy, and a reassurance if not an enticement of an external, Western marketplace. Here, the Western gaze now sees a familiar if reduced version . . . of itself. Surely this is a safely domesticated place where global capital can feel safe, secure, comfortable, and where it can deal with people whose values are its own. C. The City that doesnt work It is worth noting I think, that Edde s images operate allusively, connotatively as much as they do instrumentally. They also promise a second story of sorts, a narrative set into the storyboards that this new, modern city produces, and vignetted against the natural settings that have come to sym- bolise, to the Christian Lebanese at least, Le Grand Liban. 14 For instance, the drawing of Edde s World Trade Centre presents his twin towers as sleekly anti-gravitational, oating diaphanously above a crystalline sea as effortlessly, as naturally, as the wind-lled sails propelling the ketch in the images foreground. In a second drawing, less effusive but no less self-assured, ofce buildings march regularly along a picturesque canal framing (and spatialising) 12 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer Figure 8. Henri Edde : plan of the First Reconstruction Project for the BCD, Beirut, 1991. (Source: Gavin.) Figure 9. Henri Edde` : Martyrs Square, rst project, 1991. (Source: Edde .) Figure 10. Henri Edde : World Trade Centre, rst project, 1991. (Source: Edde .) D o w n l o a d e d
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a new island carved from the collective debris of a sixteen-year long Civil War with spit and polish (Fig. 11). Unlike this procession, promenaders dally along the canals quais as they survey motor launches passing lazily beneath them. In a fourth image, a massive circular fountain is maternally fondled within the nurturing embrace of two curving surfaces of glass (Fig. 12). These paired structures opportunistically collaborate to enclose a space and frame a vista onto the sea, seizing the prospect of an unlimited horizon. A fth and nal view seems to gaze upon the yacht basin beside the Hotel St. Georges, pausing rst at the luxurious 13 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 Figure 11. Henri Edde : Canal, rst project, 1991. (Source: Edde .) Figure 12. Henri Edde : Roundabout at the First Basin, rst project, 1991. (Source: Edde .) D o w n l o a d e d
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mid-rises on the island, and then off to Mt Sanine in the far distance (Fig. 13). For those of us who know, the view is captured from a specic vantage- point: the celebrated, pre-War terrasse atop Edward Durrell Stones Hotel Phoenicia. This nal image does concern itself with the archi- tecture of Edde s reconstruction project, to be sure. But it equally attends, it seems to me, to rather specic private activity in its foreground. Twin non- Starbucks cups of coffeeand, yes, Starbucks has reached Beirutrest on that cafe table, while an attractive couple, lovers maybe, chat quietly and insinuate the viewer into the image. Like the outside viewer, the two inside break from their intimate te te a` te te, looking towards the dramatic vista that Edde imagines here, this new view having the power to give pause to their irtations, at least momentarily. In this single vignette, Edde cap- tures the new Beirut less as progressive, modern mar- ketplace than as surprisingly romantic diversion, a delicious, enticing and surprisingly familiar world ripe, ready, and waiting for consumption. As this happens, consumption as based in need is tacitly transformed into consumption based in desire. The implicit sexual drive the image employs to power its message carries, it seems to me, another meaning, to wit, that for all the would-be modernity of this new place, the life of this city remains essentially 14 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer Figure 13. Henri Edde : The Phoenicia Terrace, rst project, 1991. (Source: Edde .) D o w n l o a d e d
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body-driven, propelled by urges equal parts boy and girl, eminently human, basic, and natural. All images operate as if to say that this much here in Beirut is, quite simply, unarguable. Beirut, whether old or new, could simply perform no other way. The combination of naturalness and diversion is reinforced in later renditions of the Solide` re project, even when those proposals are consciously designed to critique the progressivism embedded in the project itself. Most importantly, Angus Gavins replacement Dar El-Handassah scheme (also underwritten by Hariri via Solide` re) outspokenly bolsters the historical framework of the project, while consciously seeking to quell the outrage of a local Beirut population who bridled at the thought and appearance of Edde s seeming modernity (Fig. 14). Gavins outspokenly contextual scheme, which makes direct use of such postmodernist the- ories as Colin Rowes notion of urban Collage, grounds his project, he claims, within the residual and uncanny historical specicities to be found on-site, recalling Beiruts now-buried shoreline and Ottoman seawall, antiquities, heritage architecture, and so on. 15 He even furthers his design essentially to fabricate historical form (sometimes even stylistically simulating it 16 ) by introducing gridding into his plan, an organis- ational form which harks back, so he argues, to both Greek and Roman sources. Whats more, he frames the entire scheme between not one but two distinct yacht basins, a design motif directly suggesting that most resilient signier of the Levantine city-state (and this, presumably, is his wishful thinking for Beirut), the double-harboured Phoenician city (Fig. 15). 17 Despite the bounty of historical allusion, Gavins project works contrary to Rowes call for controlled ambiguity and an iridescent urban semantics as set out in Collage City. (Indeed, Gavins project is, in the nal sense, more about ambiguous control.) For that book, as the entirety of Rowes late urbanis- tic project, geared itself to unmasking and humiliat- ing any progressivist order. 18 In so doing, Rowe had sought to loosen the strictures modernism placed upon contemporary practice, allowing his kind of design to advocate a more subversive understanding of history (as opposed to historicity) and to expand its palette of meaningful architectural and urban form. 19 Gavins scheme operates quite differently. Solide` res revision of Rowe seeks to restructure and rigidify the ambiguous post-War state of Beirut, implementing essentially academic formal devices 15 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 Figure 14. Angus Gavin: Project for the BCD/Solide` re, 1992. (Source: Gavin.) D o w n l o a d e d
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that here appear nothing short of invasive. All pos- turing aside, in the nal analysis, history takes Gavins denitive scheme for Solide` re to the same place modernity does for Edde : to an ideal location which is the naturaland necessarydestination of an urban teleology. One mans history would be but another mans progress. Whats more, both projects seek to outline an architecture that is less productive in the capitalist sense of the word than attractive. Edde speaks hardly at all about the functional use of his urban ensemble and the buildings themselves assist little in the clarication. Gavins project reduces to little more than mixed use with functions to be deter- mined on demand by the marketplace. What guides the urban conception here is fundamentally aesthetic, not practical zoning. And this means that appearance is as powerful a driver of this urban conception as it was in Edde s proposal, if not more. Recent developments in Gavins project further underscore this fact: the urban vision now touts itself no longer as the capital centre of the Middle East (and its a good thing because it would be hard pressed to reclaim this title from Abu Dhabi, Jeddah, or Dubai) but as a tourist destina- tion. 20 With its plethora of archaeological remains being unearthed (and therefore degraded), Beirut now seeks to market itself as an attraction for the so-called heritage tourist. Furthermore, there is even talk now of loosening the BCDs vaunted aes- thetic zoning, the projects legislative centrepiece, in certain key locations of the plan earmarked specically for designs to be produced by so-called master-architects. 21 These buildings, so the head designer explained, might be just the constructive incentivethe archi- tainmentneeded to promote highly protable architectural tourism. 22 The new list of attractions goes on. The most recent redesign to enhance the schemes visual appeal occurs on the projects land- ll portion. This area, the one-time nancial district in both Edde and Gavin schemes, has just been recongured (by SOM no less) to accommodate a Formula 1 racing course a` la Monte Carlo, thereby targeting a wealthy class of mostly male sports tourist. And with this single grand gesture, the one-time Switzerland of the Levant is transformed into monster-car track, a fancy playground for big boys with big toys. Historical fabulation in Gavins executed scheme (and even more in Edde s unexecuted projects) went hand-in-hand with historical erasure (Fig. 16). 16 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer Figure 15. Aerial photograph of the city of Saida, showing its twin Phoenician harbours. (Source: Lebanon Opportunities.) D o w n l o a d e d
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Of the more than eighteen hundred buildings damaged but largely extant within the site connes, fully two-thirds were demolished for replacement by Solide` re. Where the remains of these buildings have gone is a simple question to answerthey have joined the other debris left by the Civil War in the Normandie dump, now euphemistically known as the Solide` re land ll (Fig. 17). Of course there were those buildings, like the suite of commercial banks along the Rue Riad El-Solh, that escaped damage vir- tually intact, thanks to smart bombs then too, or were they smart bombers? Monumental, religious buildings, no matter how degraded, were also off- limits to the developers. Historically signicant structures and urban ensembles were also pro- tected, like the Place de lEtoile. And then there were buildings belonging to politically inuential owners, like the Murr Tower, the property of the countrys former Minister of the Interior who lever- aged his political status to avoid expropriation. 23 Buildings too were destroyed for political reasons. Whereas colonial buildings of one eraof the French Mandatewere largely protected and cher- ished, Ottoman structures of the previous century, the old souks for instance, were almost wholly eradi- cated. And, as George Corm the former Minister of Finance recounts, there was the Jewish quarter in Wadi Abu-Jamil, rased, apart from the synagogue (protected as a religious structure), as misplaced pol- itical protest, or vengeance, against the 1996 Israeli invasion (Fig. 18). 24 Here, Corm indicates a case of what might be termed rhetorical demolition, that is, history erased because the reality of its continued effect is just too painful or infuriating to bear. 17 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 Figure 16. Angus Gavin: Retained Buildings, Project for the BCD/Solide` re, 1992. (Source: Gavin.) Figure 17. Normandie Dump/Solide` re Land Fill, c.1985. (Source: Gavin.) D o w n l o a d e d
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At moments like this, urban renewal goes hand in hand with denial and, in turn, leads to repression, which is, in Pierre Bourdieus reading, the ip-side of seduction, historical or otherwise. 25 Of course, the fea- tures that both reconstruction projects, Edde s and Gavins, seek to eradicate most effectively are traces of the War itselfand the vast emptiness recorded by time-lapse photographs, taken through the American University of Beirut for the Aga Khan Archnet website, registers this historical reality only too clearly (Fig. 19). 26 The land ll, that shard pile of the recent past, has today been cleansed and puried by a waste management company from Houston, Texas 27 , the dirt of the War puried of any chemical or psychological toxicity. What we nd today of the old city that Solide` res developers have deposited there is scarcely more than gravel. 28 The great irony is that there is little renewal in the BCD per se; for of the twelve hundred buildings destroyed, only six new ones have been constructed to date. 29 The Normandie dump/land ll today looks equal parts transplanted, sixty-hectare fragment of the Arabian peninsula and terrain vague. 30 What we now see in this place rests in sharp contrast to any idealising image a` la Edde . To contemporary eyes the BCD site presents itself as a stark and surprisingly modernist tabula rasa, a vast space that operates as the best defence against hidden demons (Fig. 20). Not a single building should be kept as it is to remind us of the civil war. There is no need to preserve this painful memory, so Raq Hariri recently pronounced. 31 His message here is clear. To guard against recurrent trauma, erase. In the absence of collective memory, collective denial will do. The origin of the projects frank promotionalism rests in the person of one man, Raq Hariri. The basics of Hariris background have been outlined above; however, the Prime Ministers central role as the reconstruction and planning force in con- temporary Lebanon demands amplication. As I mentioned earlier, Hariris rst impulses for the city and the BCD specically were essentially philanthro- pic, using his construction company to help repair 18 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer Figure 18. Wadi Abu-Jamil, with Synagogue. (Source: author.) D o w n l o a d e d
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19 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 Figure 19. Wadi Abu-Jamil, before and after. (Source: Archnet web site.) Figure 20. Place des Martyrs, Summer 2001. (Source: author.) D o w n l o a d e d
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degraded infrastructure. In the mid-1980s, however, his energies and ambitions turned from mere main- tenance to city and nation building, and this involved engineering not just economic opportunities for the nation but political ones for himself as well. At this point he commissioned a rst reconstruction project from French architects, largely situated on the Nor- mandie dump here recongured as a peninsular recreational development equal parts Riviera Port Grimaud and Montreal Habitat (Fig. 21). 32 Following the Taif Accords, the Hariri-designed peace pact that more or less ended the Lebanese conict, the countrys Conseil du De veloppement et Reconstruction (or CDR) solicited a reconstruction project for the city centre from Dar El-Handassah, the architectural rm in which Hariri was heavily invested. In fact, it was at his personal expense, another act of philanthropy, that the Edde project was developed. The government would soon priva- tise this initiative, and the citys public land would be rebuilt privately, or so it was thought, by the devel- opment corporation named Solide` re, a publicly traded company. And Solide` res major investor would be none other than the eventual Prime Minister thanks to his private agreements with family as well as political and business allies, many fromSaudi Arabia, who would act as silent partners. 33 D. Quidding the Quo Today there is little doubt that the BCD project has served Hariris political ambitions, and that this project like so much of his charitable work was personally benecial, even as his economic support of public works was touted as philanthropic. In a Lebanese context particularly, philanthropy does not come free of obligation. Giving denitely comes with strings attached, and acts of benevo- lence are normally undertaken with the expectation of return in kind. Call it patronage, clientelism, or what the Lebanese domasoubiyesuch modern displays of generosity, particularly in the Middle East, are seldom undertaken without an implied sense of personal debt and eventual payback. 34 As recent events point up, the quid pro quo has cer- tainly been a hidden driver of Hariris institutiona- lised philanthropy as another of his Campaign 2000 posters illustrates (Fig. 22). This one displays the candidates genial portrait against a montage of his charitable activities: historical preservation, university scholarships (some fteen thousand over the course of almost 20 years), port modernisation, educational technology upgrades, and, of course, the new BCD for which he takes the credit. All are regarded as endowments conferred by Hariri on a Lebanese population, beneting from but also indebted to his benecence. So the image serves implicitly to remind the electorate of their long- standing debt to the candidate, and of the inescap- able fact that with this election, the debt now becomes due. Its payback time, the image remonstrates. Philanthropy of many stripes does seem to have this single fact in common. Although American philanthropy (as epitomised by the likes of the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations) has com- monly been presented as having no strings attached, 35 the social theorist Max Weber has been so bold as to suggest that even this supposedly disinterested philanthropy had an implicitly ideologi- cal aim. 36 For Weber, such giving was geared to 20 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer D o w n l o a d e d
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21 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 Figure 21. Project for the BCD Reconstruction, c.1985. (Source: Edde .) D o w n l o a d e d
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educating the disadvantaged, thereby inculcating among the receivers values consonant with the interests of the benefactor. Even benefaction, particularly benefaction, extracted a potentially adventitious spiritual debt in place of a material one, particularly in those unlucky Middle Eastern places where the prize of oil was not at stake. There is a major difference between the philanthropy deployed by the Hariri Foundation and that of his modern American forebears, however. The matter of debt, real or symbolic, is somewhat different in the Islamic world because charitable giving is regarded a moral duty, tithing a fact of life for the devout Muslim. Whats more, the matter of debt that is an unspoken reality in much Western philanthropy is further problematised in Islam, for both the Koran and the Shariah expressly 22 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer Figure 22. Political poster depicting Raq Hariri and his philanthropies. (Source: The Daily Star.) D o w n l o a d e d
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outlaw the practice of usury, or the lending of money for interest. 37 This is not to say, however, that interest payments do not occur in Islam, for the simple fact is that it is not necessarily money in kind that is to be repaid. 38 Having said that, philan- thropy in Arab countries is not necessarily regarded as a gift outright, for there is an implicit social con- tract that comes attached to the Foundations giving, as illustrated, it seems, by the Hariri political poster. For it renders not just a culture in continu- ing receivership but in spiritual debt as well (as suggested by the visual exchange between mon- taged images) that is expected eventually to be repaid. And power and political support welling up from the indebted was and continues to be certainly one of the main ways of doing so. The charitable giving of the Hariri Foundation, and the inestimable role it played for candidate Hariri during the elections, suggests that the candidate used his Foundations giving opportunistically, thereby keeping an indebted constituency at his beck and call. In point of fact, it might further be said that this kind of pragmatic, politicised giving is actually demanded within the multi-religious, con- fessional construction of contemporary Lebanon, where literally every life decision is rendered simul- taneously political and religious thanks to the nations Constitution. Elections in Lebanon are won not so much by garnering the support of ones own confessional group as by attracting or securing a coalition of other special interest groups and confessions. Philanthropy particularly becomes an agent of securing old constituencies, and constructing ever-larger political bases. Hariris Foundation continues to build interconfessional support across a horizon of moral, and scal, indebtedness. Of course this phenomenon is pre- cisely the subtext of Hariris political poster posi- tioned at a strategic point in the interconfessional Mina. 39 The consequences of this second image, described at length above, sustain and derive from coupled acts of seeing at once. First, there is the gaze of Hariri who views outward, seeing less this particular place, rather something more, indenable and untenablethe city, the nation, the world perhaps. However, the potentially unlimited scope of this image is reinforced in yet a third posterin fact, a oating installationbobbing in the water across the Corniche from the Mina, framed against a sublime horizon and lapped by the Sea (Fig. 23). Its subject matter is nature surely, but also natures temporal dimension that the candidate holds in his visual, and political, sway. This mans object relations, it seems, are endless. And, then, there is the specic seeing of the people of Ain El-Mreisseh who rst attach themselves to 23 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 Figure 23. Political poster depicting Raq Hariri, oating in the Sea near the Mina. (Source: The Daily Star.) D o w n l o a d e d
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these images made prominent by their settingsand to the eyes that do not see harboured withinso as to imagine, to construct themselves as captured within the candidates viewing. In the words of song- writer Jerome Kern, this is the sort of viewthat seems to want to be seen. 40 The places lengthy lack of pol- itical representation is to be resolved, so it appears, by attracting Hariris attention to it, and, consequently, his serving the Minas interests and fullling its needs. Jacques Lacan has argued that the lack felt by the infant in the preconscious state is fullled by his attachment to the image contained in the mirror. The image, rst captured within the reective surface and then introjected, provides a provisional and temporary shape for the childs inchoate phys- ical experience and self-identity. 41 Imaginary activity of this order, though similar, is not precisely the case on the Mina. Instead, the psychopolitics underlying cultural identity, as implied by the relationship of poster and setting, suggests a scopic alternative to the mirror stage. 42 Again, Lacan usefully speaks to this slightly different construction of the gaze in a later discussion prompted by the question, What Is an Image? where he posits the impossibility of the image to perform as simple object-lesson per se. 43 Rather it performs simultaneously as an object and a screen which a seeing subject comes to occupy in part as representable identity, as well as mask concealing and protecting whatever is unre- presentablethe lack of presence. Hariris campaign posters, it seems to me, operate within this particu- lar binary psychic register. The population of Ain El-Mreisseh constructs itself as the tting object to Hariris attentionand as it does so the Mina insinuates itself into performing as object of his subjectivity. This object lesson oper- ates advantageously for Hariri as he is likened to the quarter as the quarter is to him. 44 What engin- eers their need to become his object, however, derives from equal parts need arising from their lack (in this case a specic lackthe Sunni lack of political representation in this place), and desire for renewed self-construction, accomplished via their recourse to mimicry and attraction. 45 The Minas inhabitants construct themselves not so much out of who they believe themselves to be so much as what it is that they believe that their champion desires and demands of them. The residents of Ain El-Mreisseh are thus prepared to dispense with what is perceptible of their own shadowy social identity, or lack thereof, while constructing them- selves as his partisans, as one of his own. 46 Whats more, by constructing their responses to meet the demands of the market for their services, Hariri, it might be said that the local population behaves very much like the Western marketing expertthe Kawaja 47 whom the billionaire nor- mally employs in his business and his politics to target the consumer. The difference here is that these marketers instead target a political market- place tautologically constructed as none other than themselves. In short, they are the consumers (self-) targeted to consume images of their own confec- tion. This constituency shapes itself to be the one he would have them be. As they do so, this group inhabits an image projected upon them by another, so as willingly to elicit the continued interest of the politicians gaze (as well as to disguise the reality of their social condition and the inescap- able fact of their decades-long unrepresentability). 24 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer D o w n l o a d e d
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One might say, following the Lacanian line, that the poster the quarter chooses physically to inhabit com- prises a split between potent expressive image and covert, protective screen, ingenuous portrait and disingenuous disguise. Jean-Paul Sartre would likely decry autoassimilation like this as opportunis- tic, and a collective act of bad faith. I would prefer simply to call it a contract, an arrangement, a negotiation. 48 Ain El-Mreisseh characterises, it seems to me, a pragmatic construction of wishful thinking for all parties involved, paid for at a certain personal and political costand bringing with it a certain debt for all contractual participants. Among the people of Ain El-Mreisseh, there exists the cherished belief, fostered over the centuries, that the machina- tions of masoubiye will entail benets far outweigh- ing the existential lossesand that their solicitation of symbolic capital 49 , and the debt they assume in doing this, will eventually be repaid in spades . . . and in shovels . . . and in sh. E. Historys eye At this time, when Lebanon seeks so desperately to carve out a sense of national identity, perhaps the greatest of all Lebanons debts may well be called the countrys debt to history. Here, the construction of political Self-identity is fabricated out of a deep- seated relationship to history as an articially con- structed and gaze-endowed Other. The cultures sometime submission to, and sometime refusal of, the historical gaze is illustrated in Solide` re by two specic instances. The rst illustrates the construc- tion of ethnic identity out of the connection that a political minority (though perhaps a confessional majority) fabricates across a specic work of historic architecture in the affair of the Mazar Ibn-Irak (Fig. 24). The second entails the denial of one order of the historical gaze even as the Prime Minister constructs his own. The rst case study revolves around a small Mameluke structure exposed to the public eye during the destruction of the Ottoman souks, a building that was rst known as the Mazar Ibn-Irak and then the Zawiya Ibn-Irak al-Dimashki. The small domed structure, previously invisible within the accretion of post-Mameluke construction in the souks, resembles the multitude of madrasas, or schools devoted to the study of Islamic law, in the old Mameluke capital Tripoli north of Beirut. Madra- sas like these were in fact philanthropic foundations, commonly attached to the tomb structures of their donors. And so it was with the similar Beirut example. The mazar was slated for destruction in 1992, along with most of the damaged souks, to be replaced eventually by Solide` re. Nabil Beyhoum recounts a strange series of events set into motion as demolition commenced. First, the bulldozer chain pulling at the intractable building broke, then, the machines driver suddenly experienced paralysis in one hand, and, nally, miraculously, a mysterious gure appeared at the structures doorway entreating the workers, Do not kill me a second time! 50 Because of these uncanny occur- rences (to say the least), the building was immediately proclaimed a sacred and miraculous site, and as this occurred Ibn Iraq became more than an historical name but a holy man from Iraq, the Shiite hallowed 25 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 D o w n l o a d e d
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26 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer Figure 24. Mazar Ibn- Zawiya Irak al-Dimashki: the structure dates from the early sixteenth century. (Source: author.) D o w n l o a d e d
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land, and the mazar his domicile. For the areas Shiite population, the dwelling immediately became a site of religious pilgrimage, and to lay their claim to it, they appropriated it, attaching to it loudspeakers con- tinuously shouting Koranic verses, and mounting a huge photograph of the Ayatollah Khomeini on its street side. For the rst time, the locales Shiite popu- lation, so they argued, had a religious site in the BCD equal to the Sunni, Maronites, Greek Orthodox, Roman and Armenian Catholics, Protestants and Jews. Beiruts Sunni population bridled at the idea that this site, long attached to their confession, might be redesignated, sanctied, and appropriated. This was nothing less than religious squatting. So they promptly embarked upon their own historical researches into the building. They genealogically determined that Ibn Iraq was in fact a celebrated attorney and devout Sunni Muslim and that he came from Syria not Iraq; they signied this descent by afxing the sufx al-Dimashki (from Damascus) to his name. The undeniable saintedness of the siteso foreign in feel to secularised Sunni Islamwas explained away by arguing that Ibn Iraq was a su, and that this mazar, or residence, was in fact a zawiya, or place of religious instruction, wherein mystic suc rites were practised and popu- larised by its perhaps overzealous Sunni inhabi- tant. 51 Archaeological excavation also revealed that there was a tomb attached to the structure, not Ibn Iraqs, however. 52 Case closed. The zawiya was then encased in barbed wire, discouraging further Shiite pilgrimage. And then a sign bearing Ibn Iraqs correct genealogy was afxed to the buildings most visible side, the place where Khomeini had been, dispelling historical or political ambiguity once and for all. In practical reality, though, the Sunnis rectication of the historical record is beside the point in this case. What is most interesting to me is the degree to which the local Shiite community felt the need both to attach itself to a work of architecture so as to evi- dence itself spatially, and to legitimate that connec- tion by constructing an authenticating history. This validating saga would have had the collateral effect of naturalising the local Shiite population, and of imbuing it with some kind of God-given right trans- ferable to its domicile, that is, the nearby BCD prop- erties (buildings like the recently demolished Hilton Hotel) in which the Shiites were in fact squatting. It would also have reinforced their claims to nancial compensation for any expropriation from this place, especially as Solide` re had begun its more than half a thousand million dollar payout to relocate the inter- lopers. 53 The Sunnis, however, would have none of what they regarded as religious and political posturing, nor would they allowa social legitimisation via religion that would cost them capital, real or symbolic. Whatever their rationale, Sunni counter-argu- ments do not invalidate Shiite historical or spatial claims within the now vacant BCD by attachment to a heretofore undesignated and nownewly signi- cant religious monument. For the fact remains that this buildings signicance originates in the very demands that the Shiites made of it, stemming from their insistent need to render this place, some- place, meaningful here. Furthermore, Shiite con- struction of a legitimating history stems from what the Shiites would argue was a social need to be 27 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 D o w n l o a d e d
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rendered visible. Such visibility is accomplished by giving what they believed to be their history an his- torical face, with eyes capable of viewing them and of constructing them as the objects of its gaze. Lastly, the hostility with which the Shiite (mis)read- ing of history was met among the Sunni elect suggests less the degree to which this second group felt a responsibility to maintain historical accu- racy (for certainly Sunnis are fully capable of rewrit- ing history in their own best interest as we shall see) as the degree to which such social and legiti- mating spatialisation might threaten Sunni domi- nance here. My second case study centres on an urban space at the head of Beiruts bank district, the Place Riad El-Solh (see Figure 6). This square, once attached to the city gate Bab Yaqoub, was renamed in the 1950s in honour of the Sunni leader who co-engineered Lebanese independence in 1943. Like most places in the BCD, it was extensively damaged during the War, and what remained after the War was slated for demolition in the BCD reconstruction. The present-day, recongured Square presents itself in stark contrast to its pre-War appearance, lacking spatial enclosure, amenity, or attendant urban functions. Today it is little more than a landscape ornament, a pink a- mingo, lending a little cachet to the leading edge of a parking area. The historical raison de tre of the post-Mandate space was commemorative; here thankful Beirutis erected a portrait of one co-founder of the modern Lebanese state, reconguring the space from utilitarian to ceremonial. Rene Naba, in his recent biography of the current Prime Minister, explains that the space was to be deled and the remains of the sculpture to be removed under Hariri, exiled with no hope of return. This was not, so Naba argues, the rst time the Prime Minister took aim at the Sunni political hero. Rather, this erasure was but the last in a line of similar efface- ments of Solhs memory that Hariri had effected in Beirut and elsewhere in the country over the course of a decade. 54 Perhaps the most notable instance of such eradication occurred in his home- town of Saida, where the Prime Minister hoped to remove his predecessors name from the Ring Road encircling the city, substituting his own. As the two sagas played out, Hariris plans in both instances were thwarted. The sculpture was returned to the Square as one of the last civic acts of Hariris long- time political opponent, the then-Prime Minister Salim El-Hoss 55 , and it was restored as an act of respect by Solhs own grandson, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, a Saudi-Lebanese businessman like Hariri, only much richer. 56 What was it, though, that caused the Prime Minister to take such umbrage and aim at this space and its sculpture specically? I look at one of my recent photographs of this place from its focal pointand feel an uncanny sense of de ja` vu. That meeting of gazing gure and landmark as a compositional strategythat interconnection of face, place, and monumentIve seen them before and in none other than Hariris own political poster at the Mina. And as I argued that that images visual dynamics operated there, so do I think they work herewith the gaze of state- making Solh phenomenalising the Serail in the background, the house that Hariri rebuilt for the 28 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer D o w n l o a d e d
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Prime Minister, that is, to say, for himself. And as Hariri charged the community of Ain El-Mreisseh to follow his lead, so, it seems, does the memory of Solh instruct his Sunni issue, that is, whoever it is that inhabits that house on the hill, to follow in his footsteps. Solhs lessons, however, would be difcult for this particular successor Prime Minister to follow, especially after having violated the spirit of the Prime Ministers National Pact, the unofcial accord between confessions and a proclamation of interre- ligious cooperation. 57 Whats more, Hariri at present seems less state-builder than potential state- destroyer, holding the country hostage to a debt burden produced by his capital spending pro- gramme that exceeds 40-fold the debt the country was forced to bear even at the Wars worst. In point of fact, Hariris policy of decit spending has effectively led to the withering of the civil state and its services as Lebanese debt nancing demands ever-larger portions of the GDP, now reaching almost 70%, so Georges Corm has reported. 58 And, as if this werent enough, Corm argues that Raq Hariri, hugely successful business- man, stands to benet richly from his countrys nancial woes and civil collapse, proting from his own banks 59 funding of the nations debt by pur- chasing the lions share of the Lebanese government junk bonds (at an interest rate that has at times topped 30%, incidentally). 60 The gaze of history as embodied in that statue at the Place Raid El-Solh would demand that Hariri respond to the ethical calling of his illustrious forebear; but this challenge of history must be politely, but rmly, declined. In the face of such moral authority, all, it seems, that Hariri can do is to look away, or, better still, to remove the eye of history entirely. F. Re-colonialism in Hariris Beirut Solide` re, the most visible in Lebanons array of new public works, promotes itself on the basis of moder- nised images borrowed heavily from the experience of modernity in the West. The intention, I argue, is frankly ideological, designed to reassure a Western marketplace of the countrys returning civil order, economic stability, and Westernised social identity. This is a good place, so its images imply, for you to do business. Part of the role these images have to play is to construct a productive narrative for the city of capital re-emergent, the Switzerland of the Levant. This rhetorical agenda, however, is accom- plished at the expense of another narrativethe War itself, which, dreadful as it was, constitutes the single shared experience to cut across all of Lebanons social divisions. Ironically it is the single narrative today with which all Lebanese can readily identify. A columnist for The New York Times, John Kifner, recently wrote an article headlined The Beirut I Knew Wasnt So Different. 61 His description of the city following a long absence concluded that the city seems to be returning to the same place it was before the War. For someone who has lived in Beirut recently, much of what I understand to have existed in Beirut then does seem very much present todayrestaurants, bars, boutiques, discos, gaming, prostitution, drugs. Every diversion that made this place the luxury destination of the gogo jetset during the 1960s and 1970s appears again to be in ample supply if somewhat less 29 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 D o w n l o a d e d
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immediately visible (Fig. 25). Beirut is again a (if not the) playground of the Middle East, although inter- lopers in the Gulf States have assumed something of a cultural lead. Certainly Solide` res new-found images of limpid seas, sparkling skyscrapers and boundless leisure have a major hand in promoting the idea of the city resurgent, and of turning back the clock. But along with the surplus come the real values of Beirut social life, among them, glaring disparities of wealth, dramatic and recalcitrant class stratication, the increase of interconfessional disputes that are also intractably class-bound, the erosion of the Leba- nese middle class, and the disturbing rise of poverty. A recent painting by noted Lebanese artist Mohammed El Rawaz points directly at these pro- blems in a decidedly cynical milleniallistic mixed media assemblage Third World Utopia, where a sleek and bouncy, Gehry-esque house on a hill hovers above a collection of what seem to be beach-side shanties (Fig. 26). 62 The image has denite staying power. Although putatively contemporary, this urban landscape harks back to pre-War settings of architectural high style irremedi- ably contaminated (so those of a certain social class would argue) by the plethora of squatter dwellings that proliferated in Beiruts so-called Misery Belt. Sadly, this kind of pre-War architectural view persists today in the largely Shiite informal sectors of South Beirut like Ouzai, Jnah, and Saint-Simon (Fig. 27). Plus c a change. Rawazs image seems to make hay with its subject matter, and ironically to unsettle the spatial, temporal, and ideological distinctions that his painting, and its title, initially describe. The ten- sions transmitted between image and caption give us cause to wonder, Is this place Utopian, Is this place Third World? And with the unsettling, we are caused to ponder just how utopian, just how modern, just how Third World is it? And if it is not precisely modern, nor utopian, nor progressivist, nor Eastern, then this image may just as well 30 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer Figure 25. Bliss Street, Hamra, Summer 2001. (Source: author.) Figure 26. Mohammed El Rawaz, Third World Utopia, mixed media assemblage, 2000. (Source: Mohammed El Rawaz.) D o w n l o a d e d
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be . . . us, that is, we Western observers. Rawazs picture, which putatively seeks to abstract the social realities of life in Beirut, cannot help but con- struct its Westernised viewers into its pictorial quad- rature, mirroring us in its shiny facets of metal. Which leads me to pose the following question. If it can said, to paraphrase social theorist Ghassan Hajj, that modernity is best characterised by what kind of future the First World shows the Third, then might it not also be argued that postmodernity is best characterised by the kind of future the Third World shows the First, that is to say, our Western world? 63 And what of modernity and the colonial impulse? Surely Solide` re gives every impression that this place can be interpreted as having been colonised by global, that is to say, First World capital. Indeed, it is precisely this colonisation that causes us to liken its emerging forms to New York, Paris, London, and the like. But where Beirut differs from the traditional images of Empire conveyed by modern- ism resides in the facts that its forms are gene- rated not so much to manage global capital as to attract it, and that they are primarily designed and executed by Beirutis for consumption by Beirutis. More and more is the target for Solide` re less an international, than a distinctly national market. Formalistically, Solide` re might be likened to the Bund in Shanghai, built by international investment banks like Lloyds or Barings to manage and direct English capital for purposes of exploiting an unmo- dernised China. However, such is not the case here. Rather, these Western-style high rises are the evidence of a Lebanese economy colonising none other than itself, a form of exploitation that operates by splitting Lebanese national identity, authoritative and submissive, dominant and sub- altern at once. The places desire to draw a foreign market stems from its historic role as international service centre, as hub of global banking activity. To attract, it oper- ates as a mirror of the Western capitalisation it desires, becoming the Other quietly seducing the gaze of the West while outspokenly validating it. However, to build in this way, it also acquiesces to Western demands for order, efciency, and transpar- encythere are to be no secrets here. Its forms invariably perform in conformance with the terms demanded by Western funding entities like the World Bank, always indebted to the West, ever pre- pared to submit to the terms of the deal and to repay the debt, though not necessarily in kind, when the loan is said to fall due. 64 I contend that Solide` re presents an image of a per- sistent colonialism; the great irony here is that the colonisers today are none other than the colonised themselves. This situation suggests that colonisation and its economic construction are more than a 31 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 Figure 27. View of Ouzai in the Southern Suburbs of Beirut, Summer 2001. (Source: author.) D o w n l o a d e d
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matter of nance but also, so Max Weber would argue, a matter of social psychology. 65 The compul- sively regenerative nature of capital is accomplished by continually recreating the very circumstances necessary to engender itself, and these include pro- ducing a self-sustaining manner of thinking, an ideology of capital. 66 So it is, I would argue, with the colonised. I wonder if the colonial self-construc- tion survives into Beiruts post-colonial moment pre- cisely because this place can simply imagine itself no other way. It remains compulsively colonial because it can no longer, if it ever did, imagine itself as other than a culture consuming as it is consumed, and deeply indebted as the consequence of its voracious appetite, of its need to consume. One of the oldest originary myths of the world is set in the Levant. Hesiods Theogony recounts the tale of heavenly and earthly beginnings, not to mention those of time itself. 67 Not surprisingly, time here is described in outspokenly naturalistic termsas the genealogy of the greatest of the Titans, the god Cronos. Cronos, so we are told, upon hearing a prophecy that he is to be over- come by one of his children, devours each of his offspring as they are born. Chronoss wife Rhea, determined to thwart his plans and recover her children, substitutes a rock for the last child, thereby allowing one son, Zeus, to escape his fathers appetite, and, in time, to return and conquer him. He does so by freeing his brothers as his Father Time sleeps, thus fullling the pro- phecy, thereby allowing time and life itself to resume their interconnected courses. Reluctantly acknowledging the craft of his children, Cronos bequeaths to each of them a portion of the 32 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer Figure 28. Palestinian children playing by the sea near Tripoli; photograph taken c.1978. (Source: Reed, Beirut: City of Regrets, c.1988.) D o w n l o a d e d
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universe, that is to say, a different Levantine city over which to rule, Byblos, Saida, Sour, among them. Poseidons was to be Berytus. Hariris is to be Beirut. What goes around comes around. There are curious parallels indeed to be found between the political history of Raq Hariri and the Cronos myth. Like Cronos, the Prime Ministers appetite for monuments suggests at once his vanity and his vulnerability to time, both aspects met by his desire that his Lebanese Grands Projets both glorify his name for today and retain his memory for tomorrow. Moreover, as with Cronos, the hunger for immortality felt by this new nations father can be guaranteed only by consuming his childrens sweat and life-blood as a nations indebtedness transfers to its posterity. A difference emerges, however, with the absence of a saviour as agent of salvation. This time around, there is no Zeus. In the mythic rewrite that Hariri and his political family live, a new generation of offspring is expected to escape their paternal connes in the darkness and without a guide. Because of daunting obstacles like these, we fear that the ending in the originary tales retelling may be less happy than it was the rst time around. And that Hariris children may never know the joyful warmth of the sun on their faces, or the exhilarating discovery of their bodies outlined upon the sand (Fig. 28). Postscript I am assuming that the events in Beirut surrounding Raq Hariris assassination on 14th February, 2005, well after the nalisation of this article, will prompt a number of readers to visit this text in hopes of better understanding its socio-political context. Hariris murder by parties unknown can only be con- strued as an abomination and regarded with the deepest regret and sadness. For the Lebanese, it has had the effect of rekindling the dread of return- ing sectarian violence while summoning up a repressed experience of the Civil War. In the face of these issues, it should be recalled that noone was more assiduously committed to putting sectar- ianism to rest than Hariri. It was, after all, he who engineered the Taif Accords. It is also worth noting that his postwar business practices, although criti- cised here for their empire building, were remark- able in their egalitarianism and confessional blindness; as Prime Minister his advisers numbered Sunnis, Shiites, Druze, Maronites, among many others. Whether in the business or the political arena, Hariris manner in this most contentious of places was even-handedly to engage the best people, independent of religious or ethnic aflia- tions. Indeed, he demonstrated that it was in the best interest of all involved parties to do so. In the wake of Hariris assassination, the international press reported on a returning atmosphere of cultural and political crisis in Lebanon. I can only hope that this is not the case. Indeed, it is my belief that there would be no greater affront to Hariris values of religious toleration or his practice of democratic statecraft than for the country that he loved and defended to retreat into a wartime condition of internecine suspicion, intolerance, and fear. Acknowledgement This paper could not have been completed without the caring guidance of many friends in Beirut, 33 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 D o w n l o a d e d
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including Abdul-Halim Jabr, Howayda Al-Harithy, Esther Charlesworth, Nada Moumtaz, and, especially, Marwan Ghandour. I am also indebted to Helen Seeden, Assem Salaam, Georges Corm, and Angus Gavin for sharing their experiences in Solide` re with me. At Iowa State University, Howard Shapiro, Vice-Provost for Undergraduate Education, helped to fund this work, and Architecture col- league Lynn Paxson and graduate student Linli Chen assisted me in preparing its images for publi- cation. As ever, I thank my wife Charlene Castellano for her tireless reading and indispensable criticism of my work. Notes and references 1. For a brief discussion of the construction of patronage in Lebanon, particularly the bargaining occurring among Christian, Sunni, and Druze zuama, see Arnold Hottinger, Zuama in Historical Perspective, included in Leonard Binder, ed., Politics in Lebanon (New York, London, Sidney, Wiley and Sons, 1966), pp. 85105. Samir Khalaf argues how these relation- ships transform from religious to political and commer- cial relations in Primordial Ties and Politics, Chapter 5 in Lebanons Predicament (New York, Columbia, 1987). For a working bibliography of clientelism in Lebanon, see S. N. Eisenstadt and Rene Lemarchand, eds, Political Clientelism, Patronage and Development (Beverly Hills, London, SAGE Publications, 1981), p. 311. 2. It is commonly believed that Hariri commissioned the international advertising rm Saatchi and Saatchi to design his political campaign. There is some truth to the claim. Hariri is a major investor in French marketing conglomerate Publicis Groupe, which controls Saatchi and Saatchi. The advertising rmalso works extensively with Hariris media interests in Beirut, including news- papers and Future TV. 3. Interview 7 with Raq Hariri conducted by Esther Charlesworth, 15 May 2000. 4. Beiruts construction as a Western city is a recurring theme in Christian national discourse in Lebanon, intent upon garnering a distinctly European ideological formation that valorises a particular strain of non-Arab cultural production. This mode of identication with the West is powerfully problematised in works of con- temporary ction like Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose: a Novel, trans. Georgina Kleege (Sausalito, CA, USA, Post-Apollo Press, 1978), esp. pp. 467. See also Thomas Foster, Circles of Oppression, Cities of Repres- sion: Etel Adnans Sitt Marie Rose, PMLA 110:1 (Jan 1995), 5974. 5. Any discussion of Orientalisation must account for one of the elds seminal texts, Edward Saids Orientalism: Western Representations of the Orient (Harmonds- worth, MX, UK, Penguin, 1978). This book is central to the entire eld of postcolonial theory. See Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism (Oxford, Blackwell, 2001), p. 383. 6. Forbes magazine regularly numbers Hariri among the worlds wealthiest people (108 in 2004, 83 in 2003, 87 in 2002). His estimated net worth is said to range from $2.5 billion in 1996 to $4.3 billion in 2004. Note that at a time when the face value of his property ventures in Beirut is collapsing, Hariris personal fortune grows by almost 75%. Forbes magazine website: www.forbes.com/lists. 7. The concepts Imaginary, Symbolic, Real describe the three Lacanian dimensions inhabiting the process of Identication as outlined in the Translators Note prefa- cing Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sher- idan (New York, Norton, 1977), pp. ixx. The dyadic relationship between Imaginary and Symbolic is further described by Julia Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic 34 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer D o w n l o a d e d
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Language, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York, Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 956. 8. This number does not include the 17,000 still recorded as missing. 9. Here Bauman quotes Klaus Offe, see Postmodernity and Its Discontents (New York, New York University Press, 1997), p. 22. 10. One telling discussion of post-Mandate architectural form occurs in Jad Tabet, From Colonial Style to Regional Modernism: Modern Architecture in Lebanon and the Problem of Cultural Identity, included in Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the Construc- tion and Reconstruction of Modernity, Peter Rowe and Hashim Sarkis, eds (Munich, Prestel, 1996), pp. 83115. 11. Similarly, Edward Said has spoken of three phases of colonialismmost important of these, a third period wherein the East, now educated in the institutions of the West, is empowered to direct its appropriated criti- cal tools at the incipiently imperialistic bases of Western institutions, and their driving master narra- tives. The net result is a De-Colonial, Post-Modern critical project that compels the West to consider this critique as gestated within a condition of radical alter- ity, and to internalise it. See, for instance, Saids Yeats and Decolonialisation, included in Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, eds, The Edward Said Reader (New York, Vintage, 2000), esp. pp. 297302, as well as his Intellectuals, Expatriates and Marginals, pp. 377381. See also Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York, Vintage, 1996), pp. 2545. 12. Tabet, op. cit., pp. 846. On the Frenchness of Lebanese architecture during the Mandate period, see Assem Salam, The Role of the Government in Shaping the Beirut Environment, included in Project- ing Beirut, Rowe and Sarkis, eds, op. cit., esp. pp. 1245. More specically, on the Levantine experience of French architect Michel Ecochard, designer of Beiruts rst urban plan in 1943, see Marlene Ghor- ayeb, The Work and Inuence of Michel Ecorchard in Lebanon, also in Projecting Beirut, pp. 106121. Ecochards work was closely tied to the archaeological researches of the French Institute in Damascus. 13. Edde discusses his involvement with the reconstruction project in his autobiography, Le Liban dou` Je Viens (Paris, Buchet-Chastel, 1996), especially Annnexes: La Reconstruction du Centre-Ville, pp. 225249. For alternative discussions of the two Edde projects, see Ossama Kabbani, The Reconstruction of Beirut (Oxford, Centre for Lebanese Studies, 1992), esp. pp. 3147, and Hashim Sarkis, Territorial Claims: Archi- tecture and Post-War Attitudes toward the Built Environment included in Recovering Beirut, eds Samir Khalaf and Philip Khoury, introd. Richard Sennett (Leiden, New York, Cologne, Brill, 1993), pp. 101127. For a later critique of the Beirut reconstruc- tion see Sarce Makdisi, Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solide` re, Critical Inquiry 23 (Spring 1997), pp. 661705. 14. Perhaps nowhere is this myth of place more attached to emergent Lebanese national consciousness than in Charles Corms La Montagne Inspire e, second edition (Paris, Editions de la Revue Phe nicienne, 1964). This collection of French-language poems, dating from 192034, is thoroughly Symbolist in feeling. 15. Angus Gavin, Beirut Reborn: The Restoration and Development of the Central District (London, Academy Editions, 1996), especially chapter 6 Gran- deur and Context. Gavins debt to Rowes theories has been suggested in the course of conversations with the project architect. Rowes Collage City is also listed in Gavins bibliography for the book. 16. The competition programme for the Souks, to be built by Solide` re, demonstrates this projects initial contex- tualising preferences. Its programmes brief included 35 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 D o w n l o a d e d
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various style sheets of historical detailing which com- petitors were encouraged to consider in the course of creating their proposals designs. See The Recon- struction of the Souks of Beirut: An International Ideas Competition (Beirut, Solide` re, 1994), especially Souks of Beirut Condition and Program Kit. To his credit, the Souks winning designer Rafael Moneo did not submit to the projects limited formal predilections. 17. Maria Eugenia Aubet, The Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies, and Trade, trans. Mary Turton (Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 1515. 18. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1978), especially Chapter 1: Utopia, Decline and Fall. 19. It comes as little surprise that one of the main archi- tects sub-contracted to develop Gavins Solide` re master plan was none other than Rowes collaborator on Collage City, Fred Koetter. Koetter/Kims project for the hotel district, Beirut Central District: The Development Plan for Sectors B and CThe Hotel District and the Serail Corridor, dates from July 1997. The rm also here afliated itself with Perkins and Will, the US subsidiary of Dar El-Handassah. 20. Dubai has become the Middle Easts foremost market- place, its growth spurred by its tax-free status. The city has supplemented its shopping allure with unparalleled opportunities for entertainment. Beirut is seeking to prot from Dubais formula for success by foreground- ing its leisure culture as well as by envisioning specic tax-free zones near border points, including the Lebanon/Syria border and the Beirut international airport. Beirut also imitates the tax-free zones one month a year during Fabulous February when state tax levies are temporarily suspended. 21. The latest instance of high-style architecture is the recently announced Landmark Building in Riad El-Solh Square to be designed by Jean Nouvel. This project, like its predecessor scheme by Rem Koolhaas, was commissioned by the Hariri-nanced urban design rm Millennium. See Tarek El-Zein, Building the Tallest Building in Lebanon, The Daily Star (8 April 2004), Section I, page 1. This building will be funded largely with Kuwaiti money. 22. I borrowthis apt termfromthe recent essay by Norman Klein, Architainment: LIndustrialisation du De sir, trans. Thierry Marignac, included in Au de la` de la Spectacle (Paris, Centre Pompidou, 2001), pp. 7784. 23. Unfortunately for Murr, he was unable to leverage a higher price from Solide` re, leaving the Minister holding this truly unsalvageable, white elephant of a commercial building. 24. Interview with former Minister of Finance Georges Corm in Paris at Le Do me, 15 February 2001. Corm notes that Jad Tabet conrms his claim concerning the wanton destruction of the BCDs Jewish quarter. By contrast, Angus Gavin, Solide` res chief architect, argues that the buildings were demolished because of their extreme physical degradation. Physical con- dition, however, cannot explain the wholesale destruc- tion of this entire quarter. 25. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 3667. 26. On the subject of the Archnet site (www.archnet.org), refer to my article, The East/West Web Site, Architec- ture 90:7 (July 2001), pp. 534. Hariris team responded to the web sites visual diatribe with a new book, compiled by Ayman Trawi, using a similar Before and After format favourably to spin the BCD reconstruction, Beiruts Memory (Beirut, Banque de la Me diterrane e, c.2002). 27. The 1998 Solide` re annual report discloses the company to be the Radion Corporation, from Houston, Texas. 28. Beiruts Solide` re project epitomises the modernist discourse of urban hygiene while attaching itself 36 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer D o w n l o a d e d
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ideologically to acts of historical cleansing like that described by Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1991), esp. Chap. III, The Self-Construction of Ambivalence. 29. These include the United Nations ESCWA building by Pierre El-Khoury, the power substation by Abdul- Halim Jabr in association with Bawader architects, the new Parliament Annex at Place de lEtoile and the Forum building in Rue Maraad, both by Building Design Consultants (Nabil Azar, principal), the Banque Audi beneath the Serail, by Kevin Dash, and the nearly complete LOrient-le-Jour/An-Nahar building, also by Pierre El-Khoury, in the Burj Square (Place des Martyrs). To this list should be added the proposed Landmark Building, designed by Jean Nouvel, to be erected in Riad El Solh Square, men- tioned above. 30. This is no idle comparison for an essential formal and political actor in the Solide` re redevelopment is Saudi Arabia. Raq Hariri was a developer for the House of Saud and instrumental in constructing those grands ensembles with which the Royal Family has confected the national identity of the Saudi state. See Edde , op. cit., pp. 1424. His work for them even includes the very conference centre in Taif where the Lebanese peace accords were signed in 1989. Most important are a redesign of the city of Mecca and the urban ensembles built upon previously empty, desert land not unlike the vacated tabula rasa created by Soli- de` rethat the Royal Family has built in Riyadh and Jeddah, hugely modernised simulations of rural, and village peninsular culture (Naba, p. 32, citing Guilain Denoeux and Robert Springbord, Hariris Lebanon, Middle East Policy VI:2 [October 1998]). For a parallel discussion of the ways that contemporary Saudi culture both un-writes and re-writes its culture, see Elaine Sciolino, Where the Prophet Trod, He Begs, Tread Lightly, New York Times International (15 February 2002), late edition: A4 and Howayda Al-Harithy, Manufacturing Architectural Identity: The Works of Rasem Badran in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Tra- ditional Dwellings and Settlement Review XII:1 (Autumn 2000), p. 49. 31. The once and future Prime Minister announced this injunction at the ceremony at Martyrs Square commemorating the 25th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. The Daily Star (14 April 2000), p. 1. 32. This project is included in the synoptic table of BCD schemes included in Henri Edde s two volumes prefa- cing his project for the reconstruction of Beirut. The mid-1980s plan transformed the dump into a peninsu- lar playground covered with a megastructure of seaside apartments and hotels. 33. The legislation governing the creation of the develop- ment corporation limits share ownership by any indi- vidual to 10%. Hariri, who is a Saudi citizen, is allowed to own no more than 5000 square metres of property by Lebanese law. Despite this restriction, Hariri publicly declares his investment in Solide` re at 7%. He is in fact far more invested than this, using family members and close business associates as proxies. Hariri also conceals Solide` re investment in ctive holding companies and, of course, in his invest- ment banks. (Naba, op. cit., p. 37.) 34. Patronage studies became an essential component in the study of Middle Eastern social and political patterns as illustrated by one of the standard works on Leba- nese governance, Leonard Binder, ed., Politics in Lebanon (New York, London, Sidney, John Wiley, 1966). They also shape the work of Ernest Gellner and John Waterbury in their edited volume Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies (London, Duckworth, 1977), Samir Khalaf in Lebanons Pre- dicament (New York, Columbia University Press, 37 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 D o w n l o a d e d
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1987), and Marie Picon in Lebanon a Shattered Country: Myths and Realities of the Wars in Lebanon, trans. Franklin Philip (New York, London, Holmes and Meier, 1996), esp. Chap. 5, pp. 4962. 35. Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller (New York, Random House, 1998), pp. 19, 315. 36. Max Weber posits that stewardship, and the sense of moral obligation to the poor that drives it, is one means by which the wealthy believed themselves assured of their salvation. The Protestant ethic then was not free of its decided self-interest. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons and Foreword R. H. Tawney (London, Unwin, 1930), pp. 267, 162, 170. Zygmunt Bauman, however, would argue that even the most seemingly altruistic American giving was accompanied by a simultaneously educational and moral lesson; US philanthropy, no matter how altruistic, normally came with ideological strings attached. See Bauman, Work, Consumerism, and the New Poor (Buckingham, Philadelphia, Open University, 1998), p. 10. 37. Bernard Lewis, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years (New York, Touchstone, 1997), pp. 1723, 232. 38. Lewis argues that the entire Islamic banking system sidesteps the issue of monetary interest as it is dis- placed onto various kinds of nancial and social equity, and that it has evolved from this principle. 39. The social geography of the Mina, the centrepiece of Ain-el-Mreisseh, is evenly divided between Druze and Sunni populations. 40. This expression is taken from Jerome Kerns and Oscar Hammerstein IIs popular song, The Folks Who Live on the Hill, composed for the Broadway show High, Wide, and Handsome, 1937. 41. Jacques Lacan, TheMirror Stageas Formativeof theFunc- tion of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, included in Ecrits (New York, Norton, 1977), pp. 17. 42. This term is appropriated from Milton Greenblatts book Psychopolitics (New York, Grune and Stratton, 1978). 43. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Allen Sheridan (New York, Norton, 1981), pp. 105116. 44. Ain El-Mreisseh, though mixed religiously (confession- ally) as noted above, normally throws its support behind members of the Jumblatt family, the quarters traditional representatives in Parliament. The Jum- blatts, wealthy and powerful Druze leaders in Lebanon, do not always voice the interests of the Sunni population in the quarter, and the Minas support of Hariri would seem to underscore this point. 45. This analysis is particularly indebted to Homi Bhabhas discussion Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse, Chapter 4 of The Location of Culture (New York, London, Routledge, 1994), pp. 8592. 46. The concept of lack (manque) is fundamental to the Lacanian process of identity construction. Jacques Lacans famous Mirror Stage essay, explains how the infants misidentication (me connaissance) with the maternal object constitutes a traumatic instant embedded into basic libidinal drives, The Mirror Stage, pp. 67. The lack of the object, if left unsatis- ed, can lead to an innite rebus of desire cathecting onto a cascading series of inadequate objects, all proxies for the absent originary object, which poten- tially leave the subject in a state of psychic fragmenta- tion. A spiral of innite misidentications later leads to Lacans famous series of Gordian knot diagrams, which continually circle around a hole, void, or lack: Jacques Lacan, Subversion of the Subject and the Dia- lectic of Desire, Ecrits, pp. 315318. Julia Kristeva expands Lacans theory into the domain of language, noting that lack constitutes an immanent under- tow repetitively drawing the subject toward the 38 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer D o w n l o a d e d
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(inadequate) signier, an afnity that motivates com- pensatory, poetic discourse. She underscores the binary relationship of the subject/object discourse, noting how lack undoes the hopeful synthesis that emanates from Hegelian dialectics with an unstable binarism. (Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, introd. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Margaret Waller [New York, Columbia University Press, 1984], pp. 956.) Lacan returns these ideas to the domain of the visual in his essay, What Is an Image? cited above, where the image serves as both a desirable object and ploy averting the attention of the viewer from an irretrievable past, or lack. Presence and lack correlate with feelings of power and impotence, psychic conditions that translate easily from the indi- vidual to the social body, as the Lacan-informed politi- cal theories of Louis Althusser illustrate. See Althusser, Essays in Ideology (London, New York, Verso, 1984). 47. The term kawajah is an Egyptian slang transformation of the Arabic kojah, meaning expert. The Egyptian term carries with it a cynical connotation referring to the kind of Western expertise Third World countries tend to employ to legitimate their commonly suspect political agendas. 48. In his Pulitzer prize-winning book From Beirut to Lebanon, Thomas Friedman argues that life in the Middle East is a matter of continual bargaining, and that any good negotiator here must know as much. Whats more, the thing really to fear here is an absence of negotiation. His argument would be, I think, that trade-off, or masoubiye, is somehow bred in the bone. Thomas L. Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem (New York, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1989), pp. 5018. 49. The term symbolic capital is taken from Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, op. cit., p. 291. 50. See Nabil Beyhoums, Ne me tuez pas une seconde fois . . ., included in Michael Davie, Beyrouth: Regards Croise s (Tours, URBAMA, 1997), pp. 3513. 51. For a discussion of the distinction between the Sunni- opposed Shia and the Sunni-neutral Sus, see Bernard Lewis, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years, op. cit., pp. 238243. 52. The holy man, it is said, died on the Hajj and was buried on the Arabian peninsula in the Bab al Maalla ceme- tery in Mecca. See Helga Seeden et al., Urban Archae- ology 94: Beirut. (Beirut, Directorate of Antiquities of Lebanon, 1995), pp. 1213. 53. Nabil Beyhoum, op. cit., depicts the Shiites at the Zawiya as nancially grasping, as he describes the way that they cut up the green cloth found draped over the tomb monument, to be sold as relics for prot. 54. Naba, op. cit., pp. 889. 55. Hoss, in reconstructing the monument, associates himself with Solh, becoming Prime Minister and leader of Lebanon following the collapse of the gov- ernment under Michel Aoun. 56. According to Forbes magazine, Bin Talals estimated net worth is estimated at $21.5 thousand million dollars. See www.forbes.com/lists. 57. This is the claim about Solh made by Kamal Salibi in his Histoire du Liban: Du XVIIe` me Sie` cle a` Nos Jours (Beirut, Nawfal, 1992), pp. 288290. 58. Interview with former Minister of Finance Georges Corm in Paris at Le Do me, 15 February 2001. More recent numbers put the debt at something like 170% of GDP with 80% of state revenues now going to debt servicing. Public Sector Debt Almost Unsustainable, Lebanon Opportunities (June 2002), p. 68. 59. His banks include the Banque de la Me diterrane e, Banque Saoudi-Libanaise, and Banque Libanaise dOutre-Mer (or BLOM). 60. Both Moodys and Standard and Poors have lowered the rating on Lebanese long-term government bonds 39 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 D o w n l o a d e d
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to a B, that is, a junk rating, on a par with Bulgarias and Argentinas. The high rate of interest is a measure of the risk level that the government must assume in order to attract buyers to its bond issues nationally and internationally. Incidentally, the bulk of Lebanons debt is nanced internally, bond issues having been oated in world markets only relatively recently. Capital Intelligence Downgrades Rating, Lebanon Opportunities (June 2002), p. 67. 61. John Kifner, The Beirut I Knew Wasnt So Different, The New York Times (9 July 2000), section IV16 . 62. Exhibition catalogue. Mohammed El Rawaz (Beirut, Galerie Janine Rubetz, 2000), p. 11. 63. Ghassan Hajj, Lecture, 13 February 2001, American University of Beirut. 64. Hariri now seeks forgiveness of the nations more than twenty thousand million dollar national debt in order to avert the nations complete nancial collapse. Rumours run rife that he is prepared to naturalise Palestinians exiled in Lebanon provided the national debts be forgiven by the IMF and World Bank. As intriguing as this scenario may sound, such economic high drama is scally impossible given the fact that these organisations can forgive only bilateral loans, which constitute only a fraction of the national debt. Interview with Georges Corm, 15 May 2001. 65. Weber, op. cit., p. 31. 66. This contentions Marxian tone rests in the proposition that the main function of ideology is to guarantee the reproduction of existing class relationships. The power elite relies on ideology as a coercive way of maintaining the capitalist relations of exploitation, and protecting its locations of capital and political power. Louis Althusser, Ideology and the State, included in Essays on Ideology (London, New York, Verso, 1984), pp. 289. 67. Hesiods Theogony, trans. and introd. Norman O. Brown (New York, Liberal Arts Press, 1953), pp. 6667. See also Hesiod, The Theogony, trans. and notes M. L. West (Oxford, Clarendon, 1966), p. 19. Select Bibliography Adnan, Etel, Sitt Marie Rose: A Novel, trans. Georgina Kleege (Sausalito, CA, USA, Post-Apollo Press, 1978). Al-Harithy, Howayda, Manufacturing Architectural Iden- tity: The Works of Rasem Badran in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Traditional Dwellings and Settlement Review XII.1 (2000), p. 49. Althusser, Louis, Essays on Ideology (London, New York, Verso, 1984). Aubet, MarieEugenia, ThePhoenicians andthe West: Politics, Colonies, and Trade, trans. Mary Turton (Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press, 1987). Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1991). Bauman, Zygmunt, Work, Consumerism, and the New Poor (Buckingham, Philadelphia: Open University, 1998). Becherer, Richard, The East West Web Site, Architecture 90 (July 2001), pp. 534. Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture (NewYork, London, Routledge, 1994). Binder, Leonard, ed. Politics in Lebanon (NewYork, London, Sidney: Wiley and Sons, 1966). Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judg- ment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1984). Capital Intelligence Downgrades Rating, Lebanon Oppor- tunities (June 2002), p. 67. Chernow, Ron, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller (New York, Random House, 1998). Corm, Charles, La Montagne Inspire e, second edition (Paris, Editions de la Revue Phe nicienne, 1964). Davie, Michael, Beyrouth: Regards Croise s (Tours, URBAMA, 1997). 40 A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Raq Hariris New Beirut Richard Becherer D o w n l o a d e d
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Denoeux, Guilain and Robert Springbord, Hariris Lebanon, Middle East Policy VI:2 (October 1998), pp. 158173. Edde , Henri, Le Liban dou` Je Viens (Paris, Buchet-Chastel, 1996). Eisenstadt, S. N. and Rene Lemarchand, eds, Political Clientelism, Patronage and Development (Beverly Hills, London, SAGE Publications, 1981). El-Zein, Tarek, Building the Tallest Building in Lebanon, The Daily Star 8 April 2004: I1. Foster, Thomas, Circles of Oppression, Cities of Repression: Etel Adnans Sitt Marie Rose. PMLA 110 (1995), pp. 5974. Friedman, Thomas L., From Beirut to Jerusalem (New York, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1989). Gavin, Angus, Beirut Reborn: The Restoration and Develop- ment of the Central District (London, Academy Editions, 1996). Gellner, Ernest and John Waterbury, eds, Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies (London, Duck- worth, 1977). Ghorayeb, Marlene, The Work and Inuence of Michel Eco- chard in Lebanon, Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the Construction and Reconstruction of Modernity, eds, Peter Rowe and Hashim Sarkis (Munich, Prestel, 1996). Greenblatt, Milton, Psychopolitics (New York, Grune and Stratton, 1978). Hesiod, Hesiods Theogony, trans. and introd. Norman O. Brown (New York, Liberal Arts Press, 1953). Hesiod, The Theogony, trans. and notes M. L. West (Oxford, Clarendon, 1966). Hottinger, Arnold, Zuama in Historical Perspective, Poli- tics in Lebanon, ed. Leonard Binder (New York, London, Sidney, Wiley and Sons, 1966). Kabbani, Ossama, The Reconstruction of Beirut (Oxford, Centre for Lebanese Studies, 1992). Khalaf, Samir, Lebanons Predicament (New York, Columbia University Press, 1987). Kifner, John, The Beirut I Knew Wasnt So Different, The New York Times 9 July 2000: IV16. Kifner, John, Beirut Reclaimed: Reections on Urban Design and the Restoration of Civility (Beirut, Dar-an-Nahar, c. 1993). Kim, Susie and Fred Koetter Beirut Central District: The Development Plan for Sectors B and CThe Hotel District and the Serail Corridor (Boston, 1997). Klein, Norman, Architainment: LIndustrialisation du De sir, Au de la` de la Spectacle, trans. Thierry Marignac (Paris, Centre Pompidou, 2001). Kristeva, Julia, Revolution in Poetic Language, introd. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Margaret Waller (New York, Columbia University Press, 1984). Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Allen Sheridan (New York, Norton, 1977). Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Allen Sheridan (New York, Norton, 1981). Lewis, Bernard, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years (New York, Touchstone, 1997). Makdisi, Sarce, Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solide` re, Critical Inquiry 23 (1997), pp. 661705. Mohamed El Rawaz, Exhibition catalogue (Beirut, Galerie Janine Rubetz, 2000). Naba, Rene , Rac Hariri: Un Homme dAffaires Premier Ministre (Paris, LHarmattan, 1999). Offe, Klaus, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (New York, New York University Press, 1997). Public Sector Debt Almost Unsustainable, Lebanon Oppor- tunities (June 2002), p. 68. The Reconstruction of the Souks of Beirut: An International Ideas Competition (Beirut, Solide` re, 1994). Picon, Marie, Lebanon a Shattered Country: Myths and Realities of the Wars in Lebanon, trans. Franklin Philip (New York, London, Holmes and Meier, 1996). 41 The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 1 D o w n l o a d e d
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