Untitled: An Ambigious Reading Through Calculated Uncertainty

Project idea

Beirut is a city, facing an urban collapse on many scales. From its economy to urban management, transportation, lack of access to the public & green spaces and climatic risks are a few examples of the problems that await solution with larger-scale interventions and sets of integrated urban strategies. The multicultural structure of the city, its historical significance, and its position within the region also play an important role in understanding and reclaiming the urban qualities of the city and its urban edge. This project intends to study the urban edge at the coastline of Beirut and consider it as a surface morphed among the water and land/city, where different agencies (human/non-human) overlap to transform each other. Discovering the spatial, material, and experiential dispositions along the encounters of water with land/city will be the main focus of the studio research. The challenge is to be able to develop adaptive, solitary, and resilient strategies for this particular urban context. Throughout history, Beirut has changed rapidly such as French and Ottoman Mandate Christ-Muslim density and so on so its level of adaptation is highly recognizable. That’s why, socio-economic inconsistencies, cultural diversification, historical juxtaposition occur in the city. But in each transformation Newcomers take a place in the city. Thanks to our system thinking in terms of resilience, we designed a system that can change according to all events from the civil war to a festival, port activities to the explosion. this system is formed by the superimposition of several systems. We consider trucks, cars, humans, containers, cranes, waste management systems, electricity, water as infrastructural elements. The project is exposing all of the infrastructures of the building. The skeleton itself engulfs the building from its exterior, showing all of the different mechanical and structural systems not only so that they could be understood but also to maximize the interior space without interruptions. This everted condition applied in whole port. There is almost no zoning but there is a was exposing all of the infrastructures of the building. The skeleton itself engulfs the building from its exterior, showing all of the different mechanical and structural systems not only so that they could be understood but also to maximize the interior space without interruptions. There are some constant(resistant) elements which are passenger terminal some of the waste management system elements and inconstant (resilient) which are warehouses festival spaces and all other possible spaces.

Project description

This project has been conducted within the main idea of resiliency and the durability that is provided with the proposed system which suggests a composition of structural system combinations that can be interchangable with the supplies emerged from the wastes and scavanged container parts. The uncertain condition of the project suggests a certain level of ambiguity yet attempts to provide a term of "Calculated Uncertainty" that is aimed to be attained by Beirut's resiliency.

Technical information

The project relies on industrial machinery that a port can provide with an integrated crane system. Sitting on top of the old Silk Road, the projects focusses on many transportational methods and conditions in the port area. The Grain Silo has been kept as an urban heritage with industrial interventions obtained by rusted steel material wich, the project mostly relies on as a material choice along side slavaged container parts.

Documentation

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