15 till 24 August - An International Summer 
Workshop in Beirut
Studio Beirut offers its second international workshop for architects, graphic designers, social scientists, urbanists, artists, and related disciplines in the arts and sociology. This workshop, extending over the last two weeks of August 2008 will address the topic “Rescripting Beirut.” In conjunction with the commission Studio Beirut has received to produce an Alternative Guidebook to Beirut, we propose research and design projects to confront the obvious lack of spatial history in the region, to revive and reassess the past, the present and the future as they manifest themselves in the spaces, the narratives and the plans for reconstruction and development that proliferate in the city and nation. Areas of the city that have now been leveled by war and real estate will be re investigated and interventions proposed to revive an awareness of their ongoing history. Wadi Abu Jamil, the old Jewish Quarter, or Northern Saifi, the traditional red-light district a “behind the bank”could be examples, but the city, transformed by conflict and development, abounds with such charged and undocumented zones. Research and active creative proposals will be seen as one synonymous system implemented by the directors and the many instructors along with the primary contribution of the participants in the workshop.
This will be the second such endeavor. In the summer of 2007 the first Studio Beirut Workshop confronted the topic of “Public Space”. The participants came from ten different countries including Saudi Arabia, Italy, Russia, Slovenia, Jordan, Egypt, Ireland as well as the Netherlands and Lebanon. They were architects, landscape designers, social scientists, artists, linguists, and urban planners. The instructional group was as diverse, again drawn from many countries and including a range of disciplines from political science to fine art. The pace was frenetic, with the participants preparing responses to three exercises given by the directors as well as one given by Partizan Publik, one from the Studio Beirut team and one from the group of social scientists attending. All these formed a dynamic symbiosis in conjunction with a dense series of daily lectures, two symposia at the Order of Engineers and Architects and three field trips: all in less than two weeks.
The concept was that the group, from its many disciplinary perspectives, would intensely perform investigation into the potential to reinvent public space as a concept and as a physical fact in a city and nation where its current existence is ambiguous. This, of course, had direct political implications. Design and research in this case could not be separated and were required to engage radical societal criteria. Space became a metaphor for culture and it will continue to be so in the upcoming workshop.
The Municipality of Beirut provided sites on which to work and a senior official attended the presentation of the participants work on the last day of the workshop along with several members of the regional planning commission. This interaction with administrative bodies and citizens was essential the intention was also to reach out, engage, and affect institutions and attitudes in Lebanon. Studio Beirut aims to always have this double role, as an extremely active center focusing on myriad activities and, at the same time, as a generator of wide cultural ripples reaching out to Beirut, to Lebanon and to the region and possibly having impact even in the Netherlands where the radically different ways that things occur and policies manifest themselves in Lebanon may generate new practices.
If fact one of the great values for a group predominantly from Holland and Lebanon was the exposure to the other culture through the processes engaged in at the workshop. The many lectures and presentations attempted to provide information and,more emphatically, critical models for discussing that information. This was the point, not to feed the participants predigested ideas and images of this very different and complex place, but to give them the tools to generate their own. To surprise and overturn the conventional view of things; to question those imposed from outside by all the agencies and organizations that come to Lebanon with their notions of what and how it should be described and improved and likewise to question those offered by local entities who have their predetermined notions of what and how. We hoped new ways might evolve through the process of deep immersion and immediate intervention.
The implications of these workshops are many, but the events may unfortunately largely remain an intense educational event. For it to do more so, for it to engage the complex spaces and practices that define Lebanon, to raise awareness and implement change,finally it is essential that there be the active and definitive participation of Lebanese individuals and institutions. In all its future activities Studio Beirut will remain a forum for discussion, research and action. The active generation of events in and out of the Studio will be a primary goal.
Join us this summer for the second, concentrated exercise in putting these ideas into practice. Join an enthusiastic group of participants and committed instructors and contributors as we dig beneath the scraped wastelands of easy and self-serving interpretation into the convoluted fabric of this ancient modern metropolis. Participate in making proposals, formal and ideological, that address our cultural excavations. Join us, for “we are not out of breath.”
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