About this book
Oscar Niemeyer's unfinished Rachid Karami International Fair in Tripoli has stood for half a century as a monument to a future Lebanon that never arrived. East Architecture Studio's renovation of its Guest House—recipient of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture—becomes the starting point for a wider argument about what renovation in the Global South is really doing.
Beyond Ruins treats heritage work as neither restoration nor nostalgia but as a way of coming to terms with mid-20th-century postcolonial nation-building. The book gathers case studies, conversations and visual essays from people working in architecture, governance, regenerative design, contemporary art, philosophy and gaming—a deliberately wide net, on the premise that preservation is an imaginative and futurist practice rather than a technical one.
Key features
- Case studies, conversations and visual essays from across disciplines
- Sustained documentation of the Oscar Niemeyer Guest House renovation in Tripoli
- Contributions from Amale Andraos, Elias and Yousef Anastas, George Arbid, Aaron Betsky, Sibel Bozdogan, Aziza Chaouni, Bernard Khoury, Sumayya Vally, Ana Tostões, Nader Tehrani and Akram Zaatari
- Around 150 illustrations, full colour
What you'll discover
- How heritage renovation can scaffold local co-authorship of the built environment
- Where the gaps in historicisation and archiving fall, and what they cost
- The materiality of renovation: craft, manufacturing, growth, ageing and hybridity
- Architecture understood as mutual translation between practices and communities
About the editors
Raafat Majzoub is an architect, author and artist, and Nicolas Fayad is an architect and researcher; both are based in Beirut and connected to East Architecture Studio's work on the Niemeyer site.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Dimensions: 170 × 245 mm
- Pages: 304
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783966800310
- Publisher: ArchiTangle
- Publication date: October 2024
Perfect for
Conservation architects and heritage practitioners, readers following modernism outside Europe, and anyone interested in what to do with buildings inherited from a political project that has ended.