air rights  

A vertically mobile chair which ascends up an electricity pole. The pole exists on the edge of a security zone towards the city which dictates several conditions that include no visual access towards it. Due to these security issues a chair enjoys the full visual air rights of the city but you are not permitted to do so.Through a system developed by the students the chair would ascend to the top of the pole.

A person on the ground is invited onto the chair and sits on it thinking he or she will ride up to the top and enjoy a panoramic view. However, when occupied, a system of sensors inhibits the chair from reaching the maximum height. The ride deliberately frustrates the user and encourages him to question his air rights within the conflicted city of Beirut

Why does the chair enjoy the panoramic view and open air while you are forbidden by the system?

This group’s biggest challenge on the site was to deal with the various jurisdictions the site and electric pole fell under. Clearly the systems of the city that challenged their initial intentions were raised within the intervention.

youssef ibrahim . jana aridi . loulwa achkar . thea hallak . micheline nahra 

corniche extended

Corniche Extended explores the idea that while the coastal path is technically publicly owned, as it was funded by government money, much of it is restricted to the public. The group’s intention focused on inviting the public into this space through an intervention that would render it as fragment of the public coast.

jalal makarem . farah harake . marianne safi . mustafa chehab . rami saab 

nature’s calling

“Nature’s Calling: A play on senses” involved a clear attitude to ‘occupy’ empty plots of land within a dense city where public green space is rare and inaccessible.Students rooted a public telephone into a huge private, but unkempt overgrown plot within the city. The phone booth, a clear public street fixture that rings continuously until one leaves the street to pick up the phone managed to break the ‘private’ imaginary boundary edge. Instead of a person’s voice on the phone one hears a recording of nature sounds to reorient you into an abandoned overgrown plot. Behind the phone is a sunken seating area dug into the ground that allows you to sit with your eye at the level of the plants distilling the horizon of the city.

Can the city without planned public space overtake abandoned private land ? 

tracey eid . lamia dabaghi . hala tawil . mira moussa . sara batal

out of place

“Out of Place: A public escape that is suspended in time” is based on a subtle intervention within the garden of an elevated abandoned historic house, set back from the road with a view towards the Mediterranean.
The installation of a brightly colored steel staircase on the sidewalk encouraged the curious passers-by to climb up towards the soon to be demolished house. The staircase connected visitors to a path consisting of water tanks found on the site, leading to the garden and a seating area made from recycled satellite dish surrounded by a continuous surface of bamboo.

Visitors to Out of Place were invited to sink into the seat. From that exact point and angle, the road, the city and its urban furniture disappear behind the existing trees and fence creating an uninterrupted surreal and magical horizon from the city-seat towards the sea. Suddenly the observer notices that spaces within the city can interact visually with the sea creating picturesque breathing spaces.

sirena varma . rafa farhat . wael mashini. lara machlab. lara zakhem 

the manara

Students created a museum-like promenade within the structure that invited you to climb up the ‘inaccessible’ lighthouse. Visitors included the media, neighbors and others passing-by who waited patiently to finally access this infrastructure. The museum pathway took you in onto the first level of the lighthouse and back out into the keeper’s house without taking you up. Visitors, as the students, suddenly discovered themselves in a household kitchen with the existing kitchen furniture on display. The lighthouse within the city is no longer a transportation of an infrastructure; instead it is domesticated and serves merely as the entrance to the keeper’s residence.

This intervention brought many questions to the forefront. Some of these questions and debates addressed the need to appropriate deteriorating infrastructure or their plots and somehow start to find ways to use them again for the public good.

dina mneimneh . wael ezziddine . ahmad nouriddine . jenna ballout . nasmah alghossian