 Good evening, everyone. It's my true pleasure on the occasion of the school's Fall Open House to welcome you all to tonight's lecture by Left Architects, a partnership between Ziyad Mohamed Jamaluddin, assistant professor Ed Gisab, and Makram Al-Qadi, currently adjunct faculty at the American University of Beirut. Tonight's lecture represents one of the silver linings of this very difficult moment we are in, a new embrace of the remote event Ziyad will be presenting from New York. Makram is in Beirut and will join us for the discussion. And I know all of you are dispersed across the US and the world as well. I also want to note that it's been a very difficult time in Beirut and in Lebanon in particular. And my heart goes out to all of you as well. I still remember first seeing two of Left's earliest projects and recall being inspired by how the firm already dealt with many of the ideas that have continued to take form and evolve through their work, which invariably brings together cultural wit, narrative depth, formal elegance, and irreverence, irreverent playfulness. The first is the 2001 Open Door House, a house with a single du-champion-like revolving door in the center, architecturally embodying the abic saying men barra la barra, from outside to outside. Using this door, one would continuously connect outside to inside to outside again through the movement of one's own body. The second project entitled Disorientalism explores through the use of drawing the arbitrary territorialization drawn up by Western colonialism in the Arab region. Through critical representation and operations of deformation, which borrow from miniature paintings found in old cartographic manuscripts, this drawing undoes reductive representations of the Arab world, presenting it not as fragmented, frozen, or backwards, but rather as a dynamic, continuous, and continuously evolving whole, which holds together at once vast diversities and utter cohesion. Since those very early projects, Left has developed an extensive practice at the intersection of design research and architecture as building, through which they have continued to probe the discipline, advancing novel positions against the reductive oppositions that architects still so often operates within, such as the relationship between tradition and modernity, the idea that there is such a thing as architectural language, or that so-called Islamic architecture sits outside of modernism. What Left reminds us is that what is modern is to this day all too often still misunderstood, as imposed through Western colonialism, as opposed to an integral idea, complete with its own local manifestations and advances. Their work also counters the oft-repeated idea that the traditional Arab or Islamic city, and quotes, might be, quote unquote, irrational, and it is perceived informality. For Left, architects should, and I quote, strive to produce an architecture that addresses the social, economic, and environmental challenges of our time, that addresses questions of labor, material economies, and natural resources, and that participates in the construction of communities encouraging a sense of stewardship to our environment and to each other. The sense of reconnecting, past and present, while also projecting a future in which conflicts and contradictions are beautifully resolved through architecture and the building of community resonates throughout the practice's work. From their Amir and Shaqib Arsalan Mosque to their Nihah house of many vaults, or the exhibition installation, The Right to Shade, or the most recent Sharjah Trienale, or their project entitled, A Genealogy of a Tree, which was featured in Book in Nature, Design Takes on Human Survival at the Milan Triennial in 2019. The firm has been internationally recognized with numerous awards and presents a unique model of practice in which bridges between New York and Beirut, between research and practice, between East and West, between past and future, and between architecture and the world are drawn every day. Please join me in welcoming Zia Jamal-Adeen and then Markra Melkadi. Hello, everyone. We would like first to thank Dean Amal Andraouz and the faculty at Columbia University for this opportunity to present our recent work, the Pleft Architects. Lectures and talks are always a good opportunity for architects really to reflect on their position, kind of take a step back from the daily office work, schedule, and take a self-critical distance. Due to the easier logistics of recording the lecture from one continent or from one location, I will be personally presenting the recorded lecture, and then my partner Markram will be joining from Beirut at the end for the Q&A session. I would like to start the presentation with the project from our early days as an independent practice, a project that was titled Post-Work Cards, which involved the production of a series of postcards published at the time in the Canadian Parachute magazine. And they were meant to be sent from New York where both of us resided to Beirut. There were 6,000 issues printed, which produced 72,000 postcards. The postcard is detachable from the magazine and it's also mailable. And for us, the postcards addressed multiple urban and social issues, especially in the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War, issues that we can aspire to address in our practice the years that followed and continue to do so, of course, with many challenges. These postcards addressed questions of the housing, the vacant housing, and the housing bubbles, kind of generated by high-end residential tower that were motion across the city. Questions of pollution and environmental degradation, which is generated by multiplying queries across the Lebanese landscape and dumping the trash and the trash waste into the Mediterranean Sea. But also a question of upper-mediclass family lifestyles by simply looking at the key holder or the key chain of the Lebanese family, when can start to decipher how many cars they own, how many resort houses, et cetera. And of course, kind of the continuous question of religious identity and the religiosity and the cultural wars that were playing and that continue to play out in the public sphere, Lebanon and perhaps also in the Middle East in general. The early years of our practice was around 2010, took place during perhaps what would have been considered to be a relatively optimistic period in Lebanon. The Civil War has just ended. Downtown Beirut was under reconstruction with many projects being carried out by international architects. And it appeared that many people are not anymore looking back at the past of the war, although it was still sitting kind of front and center as exemplified in these pictures. In the foreground here, you see Herzog-Demiron building, sitting really in opposition and contrast to the holiday structure in the back with its horizontality, glass and openness. So by some metrics, Lebanon was doing okay. And it's during that period and around that time that we were hired to design our first building, the Beirut Exhibition Center. The project was located in the landfill area of downtown Beirut, a landscape that really came to reveal a much more contested and troubled states of affairs than was immediately visible. Of course, the Lebanese Civil War took place between 1971 and 1976, excuse me, and 1990. The city was divided in two halves. The east is mostly Christian community and to the west is mostly Muslim community. And in between is a green line that gained its name due to the wild vegetation that grew in this deserted romance area. The fiercest battle took place in the downtown area. In yellow here, you see highlighted the building that were destroyed during the war, totally destroyed. And red are the buildings that were demolished actually after the end of the war by the real estate company that was responsible for the reconstruction process. The rubble of which those buildings, the stocks were dumped into the sea creating kind of an instant landfill area of seven square kilometers of potential real estate. And the building really sat on that contested land. The Exhibition Center was the first cultural program in downtown Beirut. And very quickly, we recognized that we were sitting in a massive, potentially massive construction site and context, which would be characterized by excavation and movement of equipment and material. And so our response to the warehouse structure that was handed to us and that we recycled was to basically skin it with this reflective corrugated aluminum finish which is really meant to reflect the growth of the city that is yet to come around it. So the building becomes almost a meter to the construction process in downtown Beirut. This facade, which refutes shadow actually is also sitting on top of a reflective pool underlying and emphasizing even further the placeness of this kind of new Tabor-la-Raza. The interior is planned around moving exhibition and storage walls that meant to adapt to the different curatorial needs. And during really the lifetime of the Beirut Exhibition Center, there were more than 50 exhibits that were hosted catering to local and regional Arab artists. But with the decline of the reconstruction process and almost the complete halting of it due to economical situation due to kind of precarious geopolitical instability in the Middle East and perhaps due to the shortness of vision of the master plan itself, the landfill area remains vacant until today with no building, with no construction. And the Beirut Exhibition Center ended up really reflecting nothing but the sky around it. It's delicate aluminum facade, which meant to kind of be scored and scratched by the aspects of dust and construction activities around it was kept kind of continuously maintained and polished almost by an army of foreign labor. The landfill area became the depository of unused material, archaeological findings that were kind of illegally uprooted from their historical sites and building mock-ups. Finally, in 2016, the building was finally dismantled and it facade now it's stored in a warehouse. So while downtown Beirut was undergoing a reconstruction which is geared towards truly a global audience, the rest of the city which has actually left underdeveloped was absorbing instead the needs of the local kind of Beiruti population. And this included the prominent Hamlet Street which is located west of the downtown area. Hamlet Street is considered one of the first narrow modernist street in Beirut. And in fact, it had still actually demonstrated that an alternative and a more vital form of urbanity that is truly serving the lower middle class and the middle class Beirutis. The street is pretty narrow running east-west and it's characterized by a series of non-descript or generic still unkept today modernist structures. And like any good modernist building, the buildings that are facing north are covered with one of the earliest curtain wall facades and the building that are facing south covered with movers and screens. But what really made the street kind of more of a localized modernist architecture is actually not the aesthetics of those buildings but really the density of them the way that they are enmeshed within the existing fabric of the city. And their urban characteristics and as the building slightly lift up from the sidewalk, housing underneath many movie theaters and cafes with steps up and down and through kind of bringing people in around to perpendicular street really robust ground floor articulation. And our design for Saleh Barakat Gallery which is located just off Hamra Street occupied in fact the basement of an old theater in one of those typical modernist buildings in that district. And our proposal built on many of those urban characteristics of Hamra, namely by the introduction of a cascading active stair through from the street through the lobby down to the gallery area. But at the same time, allowing kind of a crane here for the movement of the artwork down into this pit and the pit to the main gallery floor. The main gallery is kind of try to gain the maximum height by kind of leveling the existing seats of the theater while using the pit underneath the theater stage as the storage area for the art. This model shows kind of the beam of light that would penetrate deep in the gallery and the view back into the lobby and the sidewalk from the gallery below. So from the sidewalk, large doors open to the main lobby where people and art would basically flow in and cascade down either the stair or down, this is the track of the crane that would pull the art down into the basement level. As one comes down, landings start to give you kind of further glimpses deep into the gallery space. The stair kind of lands at the gallery level and divides basically the projection room here behind the stair from the main gallery area which is typically used for artist's talks. In the gallery space itself, we left the existing trapping of the old theater including the catwalks, the light tracks and we kind of stripped and exposed the deep beams that actually hold the building above. And here we are led into the back of house of the gallery space where art could be slipped down into the basement storage area. We're actually saddened that one of the people who we worked with closely during the construction and afterward at Beirut exhibition, sorry, at Salah Barakat Gallery was a victim of August 4th blast and we'd like to dedicate this part of the lecture. Another kind of interesting distinctive characteristics of Hamra is it's a nearly layered architectural history. As the main Hamra street was modernizing as described earlier, the surrounding neighborhood remained somehow or somewhat in an intermediate state with a mix of building types from different periods. Here you see, for example, in the center, a smaller historical building with its large garden now entrapped by more recent building that followed modern street alignment and obviously maximized the built-up area. This is another condition where a large tree kind of lost its garden, kind of trimmed by the Lord and sits now wedged between the sidewalk and the building next to it. Now our project, Room Extension, occupied actually one of those odd in-between site with its own large tree in Hamra neighborhood. This is a map that shows the site here in the middle with its own long tree. But also the map illustrates or kind of shows the other lonely trees with similar urban condition that actually belong to the same generation of buildings from the early 20th century around the neighborhood. Those buildings used to have larger lots but now they are subdivided and parcelized or turned into parking lots. So the project is cited right here. It's wedged between two buildings and the room that we were commissioned to design is an extension, it's a winter room extension of this highlighted apartment at the elevated ground floor. So the paradox of this project really that we faced was the desire for this winter room to be kind of open to the garden and to the sun but at the same time the needs to be enclosed in this high density neighborhood for the sake of privacy. And our response was kind of in two steps. One to continue kind of this heavy green vegetation and kind of to densify the street edge and to design a lattice roof structure that is made out of stacked steel beams that are running in opposing direction and that would act on one hand as a shading device but also would provide diagonal privacy from the neighboring tall buildings. The structure kind of peaks out to capture here the southern light. And the sectionally, the structure you can see kind of slips into the balcony which leads into the dining and the kitchen area but also has its own access from the street. The other cross section on the garden shows how the new structure embraces the tree. It also provide a doghouse for the domestic dog on one end and on the street sides it actually offers a small little tower here that would house a bird feeder that would help basically feed the birds of those inhabiting those kind of lonely trees that were left over in the city. This is a street photo that we just took this weekend. The building is almost done. This would be the tower where the beat feeder will be hanging. Here to the back you would see also the doghouse in the way the structure kind of jets out and cantilevers to embrace the tree. The tree canopy becoming almost a second roof to the structure itself and the beams, the cross beams of the structure kind of bends themselves around it to adapt to the trunk. Here you see the tunnel that leads into the apartment with what we're calling here kind of the entry shrine. That is meant basically to display multiple objects and icons at the same time. The ceiling, this is looking back to the garden and there's an extra layer of shades with retractable shades that tops basically the structure and this is looking back into the street and from the street. So how my neighborhood we've just been discussing has many academic institutions that are built within it and it has long been occupied or assumed to be occupied by a mix of population from diverse religious and non-religious backgrounds. In contrast, the rest of the city contains a more fragmented or siloed form of neighborhood whose populations are more or less religiously based. The sociologist Samir Khalaf had described this phenomena as the quote unquote the realisation of Beirut where he states that basically the city's urbanity has failed to produce the imagined secular urban citizen. Instead, the city is divided along rural territorial lines. So if you look more closely, you see kind of this area inhabited by people coming from South Lebanon, here from Mount Lebanon, Northeast, here from Mount Lebanon, Southeast and these territories follows more or less a kind of a sectarian allegiances. So the city residents who work and live in those urban areas during the week actually frequently travel back to their rural towns over the weekend and over holidays. In a mirror effect, Beirutis who actually are from Beirut have their own and spend their own summer summers and resort towns and houses in several kind of rural towns in the mountains of Lebanon. This phenomena has been obviously supported by extensive urban roadway system that was first conceived by modernist urbanists in the mid 20th century. A roadway network that perhaps started more connecting regional cities like in this case Damascus to Beirut but that had continued to multiply in an ad hoc manner, making the small mountainous kind of territory of Lebanon much more accessible via car. And it is this fragmentation of urban rural living that produced and proliferated the seasonal resort house type across the Lebanese landscape. An out-to-out house, the project that we worked on is located in the skinny resort town of Fakhra in north of Beirut and it really gave us the chance to question and to kind of rethink and further this typology. Now in Lebanon, there's an expression that goes from the mountain to the sea. It's an urban myth and a slogan that was actually promoted by the Lebanon's National Tourism Council in the 1960s and that really celebrated a climatic overlap in one moment during the year, one person can be skiing but also within an hour drive down to the seashore and taking a swim into the sea. So the design that we proposed for that house located in the ski resort area was to collapse this geography and climate into the spaces of the house, producing a seasonal understanding of those spaces rather than a programmatic one. So here you see kind of a diagrammatic plan of the house that show the different spaces that will be used, outdoor spaces that will be used in different seasons. Further, on one hand with the warming weather and on the other hand when you kind of overlap this yearly calendar with religious holidays since we have 17 different religious sects all having their holidays as national holidays, you quickly realize that the season occupancy extend even further and so the house aimed to be used across all season almost as a permanent home. This drawing shows the location of the house on this corner with the possibility to kind of connect the upper road through the house to the lower roads. This section along this path actually shows the contrast between the hermetically sealed let's say villas and chalet kind of contained and siloed behind their own fences in this part of the resort in contrast to or comparing to let's say the diverse outdoors and semi-outdoor spaces that the house offers. The building kind of sits against hugs and away the corner it bends on itself in order to produce those multiple exterior spaces such as the pillow tea space which you see here or kind of creating a hole throughout the mass of the building. The entry kind of shallow steps leading to the entry back from the back which leads to an exterior stair behind this door that takes you up to the roof garden and then back into this elevated courtyard space from which one can basically go down into the pillow tea space and then straight to the lower street level. One taking this path would be able to travel up and around the external spaces of the house without really ever entering it. And you see here one of those conditions where the exterior step comes in close contact with the interior glass of the house. The second of our house projects is located in the Shouf mountains and the town of Nihah to almost two hours away from Beirut. And here we see a counter effect to this ruralization of Beirut phenomena. One that perhaps could be best described as the suburbanization perhaps of the rural area which is especially manifested in these large family-owned states where basically offsprings end up dividing what used to be an agricultural land into smaller plots for single family seasonal houses and practically rendering the landscape and the territory totally unproductive. The large site kind of similarly large that we worked on is just down the road here. It's also owned by one extended family. The title of the project is House of Many Evolts and it really meant to house many families under one roof on a site that faced the same risk of this kind of land fragmentation. So the state which is approximately 20 acre if you would follow the normal practice would be separated and divided into five separate plots with five independent houses. The land will be kind of eaten out with a steep roadway that kind of trying to navigate the slope terrain. Instead our proposes it reduces a large family house almost located at the mid plateau level of the sloping site. This house would house all the collective family gathering functions and underneath it and the plants that this house is built on it are where all the private wings would be embedded. This way most of the agricultural land would be preserved. This diagram basically shows how this agricultural land is being irrigated and this is done through basically two water reservoirs. One up the hill that is actually fed by a water pound further up the hill that is owned by the family. And then another water reservoir is incorporated in the prints of the building and collects rainwater from the roof of the building and from the plant itself to irrigate the lower part of the landscape. A further kind of massing criteria here worth mentioning is that up the hill, there is a religious shrine that is dedicated to the prophet Yoh. And the house in a way kind of bends back and slopes towards the shrines and open the views on the opposite side towards the sea. This drawing illustrates basically the cascading kind of landscape from the main building which is composed of multiple rings, the first ring being vegetation and then a flower garden which is then followed by a ring of pine and walnut groves and oak basically that are usually planted in this area. This area of view kind of illustrates the siding, the tucked private wing spaces in the plant, the water reservoir which is absorbed in this corner and the beginning of the preparation of the terracing of the land for the agricultural purposes. This shows how the building kind of rises up away from the shine which is behind us here with this faceted roof geometry that creates multiple ridges and gutter to collect and drive the rainwater into the reservoir. This roof is also clad with vertical fins of stone that meant to cast shadow on the roof itself and kind of reducing such the summer heat gains. Here you see a scene where the gutter will be located, these kind of micro gutter will be discharging the water in this lateral gutter on either side of the building as well. The kind of boxed pitch roof is merged with an architectural of vaulted spaces below that acts as an organizing principle within the house. And here you see the interiors kind of characterised by this lightness and fluidity of open the common spaces of the house with this kind of geometry of vault and cross vaulting intersections. So here our interest in religious architecture and more specifically in the architecture of the mosque started when we first saw this ad on the upper left corner here in Switzerland in 2011 which was posted in preparation for a public referendum at the time calling for banning minarets from mosque in Switzerland which legislation that actually passed and leaving Switzerland a supposed Western democratic country with only four already built minarets. And one can basically extrapolate that this legislation foretold perhaps the rising Islamophobia that came kind of proliferated let's say in the West since then, especially perhaps today. But for us this led us to raise many questions that are obviously embedded in architecture here and that were carried or addressed in our city of the slums. The project is kind of a long ongoing critical research on the architecture of the mosque. This research was first kind of being proposed in academic circle, first at Yale University by proposing a design studio on the mosques and then of course since then at the school at Columbia. A building type that is really if looked at at all in Western educational institution is looked at as a historical model with no contemporary relevance to it. The research was furthered in kind of series of installations and exhibitions first here at Prague Quadrennial in 2011, proposing almost a degree zero mosque in the form of a carpet. This was followed by a mapping exercise on the architecture on the plan of the mosques which basically evolved into an only like a map depicting mosque non-linear transformation across a thousand 400 years. This study kind of foregrounded for several characteristics of this building type. For one it's extremely varied scales. It's the hybridity of its program beyond the liturgical function. The varied orientations of those buildings toward the sun and the varied equality of lights within those building which is actually produced by its fixed, worldly orientation towards Mecca and its relationship to the city and the landscape, a relationship that started as one of integration and merger and as we move into the 20th century the mosque became obviously a much more isolated and detached object from the community it's supposed to serve. The map was then exhibited in Oslo architecture in 2016 in the form of this low table and then again in Sidio X Istanbul in 2017 in the form of this diorama. The interior of this diorama plotted on the ground the mosque construction history while the outside mapped and plotted the history of mosque construction in the last hundred years. So another piece at the exhibit called a prayer for one the installation here questioned the modernist universal secular human scale of the modular which is really based on the white Western man and what we produce instead is the man and the woman kind of faithful version of it by tracing the metrics of evolution and the praying postures and kind of mapping them on the curtain surface itself. So the Middle East region today is caught between two opposing religious narratives. On one hand there is kind of a mainstream sectarian narrative that declares that religious groups in fights and wars are all age old, they've been there forever and it's hopeless. And on the other hand we see another kind of extreme counter narrative that pushes back and propagates its own kind of imaginary of a history of a so-called harmony among diverse religious group in the region. But of course a close historical reading shows that sectarian wars and extremism and in fact late 20th century phenomena it also shows that were true that were religious in fight and disputes historically but this did not and does not eliminate the many successful attempts and the continuous desire to build forms of coexistence and I would argue that there are plenty of evidence of this fact in the history of religious architecture and the reason and that's why you see ISIS here kind of religious Islamist extremist group from the 21st century demolishing and erasing mosque that do not belong to their sect religious sects and their desire to construct a pure let's say authentic and fast. So and it is within this context that we were hired to design the Muhtara mosque in the rural area in Lebanon and the question that first come to mind was how do you design a religious space and a place that is characterized by multiple religious tradition with this complex history? The site that we were handed is this low masonry cross-vote construction more specifically these two units which was topped by 1970s concrete floor that's cladded with stone. The stone construction itself is an extension of this 18th century palace up here up the hill and it sits butted by this parking lot. And our first move was actually to erase to demolish sorry the second floor to remove and erase the parking and instead kind of to create a civic plaza that sits at this kind of critical rural roadway intersection and the Shoof mountains. Then an exterior structure kind of was added. It's shaped to correct really the orientation of the existing structure below it towards Michael which is really all you need to be able to perform prayer. And the structures that was existing structure let's say that's added provided kind of a solid or a transparent reading of itself as one kind of moves around the structure made out of this thin steel plate to render itself almost transparent kind of merging with this thick green backdrop. Geometrically the added structure was a critique or an exploded version of the main kind of mainly propagated Ottoman cube and dome mosque type and turning it into concave and convex structure that would define multiple exterior spaces in and around the existing building and that is basically open to anybody not only the people who would use the space of the mosque itself. So you see here how the plazas could kind of perform as an extension of the interior space but also you see how this on Fridays for instance and you see here how the structure could start to act as a screen towards the interior of the mosque during the other part of the other days of the week. And here the plaza that is created on the basis of stepping up into the new public roof on the top where the one can sit underneath the canopy kind of looking back at the valley next to a planter of time herbs. Two calligraphic words, the word Allah or God on the minute and the word Al-Insan or human being on the plaza wall are kind of pixelized into this and in order to reinforce this thinly formed steel structure with the intention of kind of confusing excuse me the ornament with the rational structure and the word human being itself recalls the forgotten history of humanism and the Islamic tradition. The water canal that cascades down from the palace up the hill is also kind of partially diverted to revive the 18th century pool on the plaza level and then provide water to the ablution area and the Sabeel or the potable water fountain that also offers travelers water, fresh water whether they are using the mosque or not. The interior of the mosque which is only 70 square meter is marked by this punch skyline that in the existing crossfold that kind of accentuate the direction towards Mecca you see here and the Mehrab which is the apps usually a monodirectional object pointing towards Mecca is here finished with a polished stainless steel making it poly directional. I'm also recalling kind of the contested and the long history of the mosque directionality to Mecca which used to be to Jerusalem before that and the kind of the change in this universal criteria. The carpet that you see was designed in collaboration with the artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan and it was envisioned almost as a graphical representation or a EKG graphical representation of the call to prayer which is printed on the carpet. We also worked with Lawrence on composing a new call to prayer that is spoken instead of sang and only broadcasted on the inside. So as one looks through the skylight towards the minute which is in source of sound is actually here is internalized within the space of the mosque itself. To the back of the mosque there's the word ikrah kind of inscribed in the wood cladding the word ikrah is the first word of the Quran and theologists have long debated the meaning of the word because it could be translated as read or as recite the Quran. Of course a more progressive interpretation for ikrah is to read the Quran which is assuming that the Quran is a post structural text that could be interpreted and not memorize or recite the Quran almost as a meta narrative. The project work was executed in collaboration and working with local craftsmen and local material and mason's but this was done also in combination with high precision that say steel fabrication which really accelerated the construction process and the installation. So while the existing cross-volted space was being renovated the steel structure was being fabricated and installed in a few days only. Our continuing research on the architecture of the mosque was taken in Sharjah architecture Trinali last year which was titled the rights of future generation and created by Adrian and Houd and our entry was titled the right to shade. And the right to shade for us was a critique of the hegemony of right to sunshine which is a mode of operation that we understand it to be kind of promoting that was promoted during the 20th century modernism period shaping the modern European city especially after the end of the second war kind of promoting street setbacks standing on building kind of sunny open plazas all kind of becoming identifying the elements of the new hygienic and rational city. Yet when this mode of operation was uncritically important almost wholesale and the modernizing Arab cities especially in Sharjah here it meant doing away with the courtyard houses with the historical dance fabric with the shaded urban streets but also doing away with the shaded courtyard of the mosque which in this case stands literally as an isolated object in the middle of the roundabout. Our kind of proposal after studying Sharjah mosques proposed to introduce basically the Sahn which is the historically shaded courtyard in order to provide kind of prolonged shade condition across time of the day and throughout the seasonal and religious cycles of the year here basically with the hope to provide shelter for a potentially larger and new public that would not necessarily need to use the mosque. The installation itself was a one to 10 scale model of that canopy structure lifted in the air and kind of beaming through it on the ground and animated scenarios showing how the movement of the sun throughout the day and the season would regulate and unlock the non-religious social activities that then will be interlaced with the religious rituals. This is a really sped up video that kind of demonstrate these different scenarios. The sun first regulating the direction to Mecca as it shifts to the four prayer purposes as it's shift to the afternoon there's a gardening activity that's happening within this tree's nursery shifting to kind of feast in Ramadan soup kitchen which follows by religious activities and then back to another season few months later where those trees are more mature and they are moved either to the central court almost as an emerging new rituals around the plants or distributed to the neighborhood kind of producing even more shades across the city. Tawaf was our entry for the design of the Lebanese pavilion at Milan architecture the Trinale last year under the theme of broken nature which we've done in collaboration with the biosphere shelf reserve. And Tawaf means the act of circumambulating or rotating around a sacred object. You can think here of course of Kaaba and Mecca but this is a practice that is shared by many religious tradition and the last of which is actually the Islamic practice in Mecca. We were representing the Lebanese pavilion and we took it on ourselves that the installation would challenge the idea of national pavilion by taking on as a topic of investigation the cedar tree which sits as a two dimensional emblem on the Lebanese flag. Due to global warming of course the tree now global warming is basically exposing its fragility as the temperatures rise the cedar ecological comfort zone is moving up the mountain to higher altitude because the tree basically chases the cold winter to reproduce and here we have the trees at the highest point of the Lebanese mountain so there is no more height to migrate to. The proposal for the installation was to cut across section of cedar that tree trunk from the shoof biosphere from the shoof cedar reserve in Lebanon spatializing it by superimposing the political and the industrial history on its ring across its longer geological history which goes back 10,000 years to the end of the Ice Age period and then it's through this growth rings the map becomes kind of interpretive it unpacks and unscribes the biblical the literally and the political imaginaries that are constructed around the Lebanese cedar tree and it's superimposed along the longer geological timeline of the tree itself which goes back as I mentioned earlier to the Ice Age at the time when the cedar forest actually had died and never really recovered since then. The installation also exhibit regional maps that tried to subvert the myth of this territorial boundary of the cedar forest in Lebanon which is very few of them and here it illustrate basically the ecological extent of the cedar tree forest beyond those political boundary which now we know the tree starts the forest starts in Turkey and the north and Lebanon is actually is the utmost southern tip. So visitors kind of are encouraged basically to circumambulate around the trunk map as almost the new sacred kind of reading the expensive history between the lines and across the walls you see of the exhibit here circling the floor map you see photographs of the cedar forest by diversity and its season cycles of rejuvenation. This is the plan of the Omeyad Mosque in Damascus which was built between 709 and 715. What is interesting about the plan drawing itself is the fact that it reflects the history of the making of the building. So if you read at the bottom the walls for Shea legend they are basically assigned to different construction periods. So what we learned is that the mosque and its final form as it stands today actually incorporates material from earlier religious structure that had occupied the same site before it was turned into mosque. This includes a temple to the Roman god of Jupiter which you actually see part of that perimeter wall of the temple here at the bottom end. It also incorporates material from the basilica that was dedicated to John the Baptist that also sat on top of the temple. And in the early years of the mosque there are several historical accounts that tell us that the preserved terminus of the Roman temple was actually used by both Muslims and Christians for prayer purposes keeping in mind that while Damascus was the capital of the early Islamic empire it was still occupied by a Christian majority. But maybe more importantly for us here is that to this day the Umayyad mosque houses multiple shrine within its walls including the shrine to John the Baptist which is nested within the coronade of the main prayer hall here. And although the mosque serves the Sunni community more generally it also houses the shrine of Hussain Ibn Ali who is the grandson of the prophet which sits here in the perimeter of the wall frequently visited pilgrimage site for Chia Muslim community in the Islamic world. So the Umayyad mosque becomes a syncretic space which is not only shared by the different religious groups but also allows the mixing of those groups within its courtyard. Our last ongoing project here at Vassar College here in New York is titled The Office of Religious and Spiritual Life and Contemplative Practices. And the college asked us basically to convert this existing structure and its ground to house more than 13 religious and non-religious spiritual student. So of course the question we ask how can we create those kind of syncretic spaces that on one hand challenges the challenge excuse me the secular religious divide construct that is really a characteristic of Western understanding of religiosity but also that provides the specific needs of each group to be able to perform their liturgical functions. And so the project started with a programming phase and the series of workshop a total of four over five months with the aim of carefully documenting and mapping as much as possible the spatial spiritual practices of the students kind of moving away or looking away from the religious authorities kind of prescription of those practices and instead trying to map the lived experiences of the student who would be using the house itself. It was an exercise that operated at multiple scales. We had workshop on the house and then on the ground of the house and then on the campus scale and produce really unexpected findings which were then consolidated in what we call in the strong the spiritual landscape of Vassar college campus and its environment which a map that illustrates the unconventional interior and exterior spaces the student themselves appropriated or used across the campus to perform their rituals. And red here is Pratt house within this spiritual landscape and the house was conceived to become part of this spiritual network and not to stand as an isolated object with its own duplicating let's say religious activity that's already happening on campus. So the schematic design proposes kind of a circular path that connects three other campus pedestrian pathways along which several outdoor pavilions were inscribed with the attempt with the exact attempt of producing spaces that could be shared by coupling and joining different religious group in one physical space but also that encourages the mixing across those spaces along the circular path. This is a work in progress schematic plan that illustrate the grouping of those different religious communities. For example, here we have put together in one architectural form the Muslim the Jewish community but also the Quaker community. This space nests the Hindu and the Sikh community and they are coupled with water fountain and ablution on the other find that provides water for the people walking along this path as well. The Buddhist kind of linear configuration is coupled with the labyrinths and here at the entry under the tree there is a Bible reading circles that put together the four different Christian religious group on campus. This is basically one example of this shrine pod so to speak that is shared by the Vassar Muslim Student Association with their own direction towards Makkah. The Vassar Jewish Union following this line would be basically the proper direction to Jerusalem and the Quaker circle of friends that would basically will be occupying the perimeter of the square itself. And the architecture of which is still very monolithic or is monolithic enough not to overly express the individual groups identity but with enough signifiers within the space like the multiple kind of apps is here the directionality of the tile or a scene in the floor enough for the kind of the different groups to properly perform their religious functions. Thank you. Thank you so much Ziad and thank you Makram for joining us. I know it's late, very, very late in Lebanon. This was a wonderful talk and I love, I mean just to kind of start maybe a little bit with the end. I love how your practice that is so anchored in kind of the root and Lebanon is informing your practice in the US and this kind of feedback loop. But first to just start more generally if I think about how left approaches architecture and I see that from the very first project exhibition center and thinking about you mentioned Solidaire as the kind of downtown Beirut as conceived as the city yet to come. And I'm thinking about Hibabu Akkar another professor at GESAP who wrote for the war yet to come. So the city yet to come is what generates the war yet to come around it and it's in its periphery. And I think you sort of even though the building of the exhibition center sits sort of in the heart of Solidaire or on Solidaire is reflecting as the city yet to come is reflecting in a way the war yet to come. And I really kind of look at your practice as kind of bringing all these ideas and compressing them into the built form. But there are always these very, very larger ideas. Another sort of contradiction is in a city where everybody wants to build new and sort of erase and you are intervening. Your kind of the exhibition center is an active preservation. The little outdoor room is an insertion. There's even mapping of trees. And so the question of context is really quite important for you whether historical context, cultural context or environmental context as in the House of Many Vaults, right? Whereas there's a kind of strategy that is entirely almost dictate, well, that brings together cultural sort of resonance with a sort of strategy of the land and of kind of maximizing agriculture and water collection. And you know, you've criticized the notion of architectural language and yet I think kind of embrace typology and play with language. I wanna kind of focus on that as well. And, you know, I do also think about your practice as very much anchored in this moment in the 21st century where I would think that, let's say Western architects or yes, Western architects or would still claim that there is such a thing as the secular, that somehow architecture or modernism, European modernism was or there's a kind of ambition to be secular, but your kind of research on the relationship between religiosity and architecture and the contemporary sort of undoes these notions over and over again. And here I recall a talk a few years ago with Adam with Caruso St. John where, you know, they sort of, I asked them about, you know, their fascination with churches and it was taken almost as a critique, but at a time when we are seeing how religion, how there is no such thing as the secular and religion is infiltrating, you know, everything. Again, I think your architecture is kind of revealing that, but also subverting that. And I wanna hear about the subversion. And finally, architecture as if designing forms of coexistence and certainly we need those today. And so kind of very interested. So maybe we start with the question of the relationship for you between, I mean, this is open house and, you know, you've shown really architecture as architecture, architecture as building, you're very much interested in building or exhibitions, installation. What is, how do you see this connection between your design research and your scholarly research and then the practice itself and, you know, that feedback loop. Because clearly it's fascinating to see how much the research into the mosques, which, you know, I know you started almost as a sort of desire to sort of push or de-center or, you know, architectural history or look at maybe an unstudied typology. And yet it's really informed the practice, you know, all the way to the Versailles College project. So maybe starting with that relationship. Marker, you're muted. Yeah. So for us, I mean, we're coming, both of us, I mean, from a more secular background. So for us to be always identified externally when we went out in the US or around the world, you're always thought of in terms of your religious identity, which we wanted to tackle to just really try to get out of it. So kind of to look at it from an outside perspective in order to exactly, not necessarily subverted as such, but reveal the lightness with which one can approach religion. And I can give you an example specifically in the Muhtara village. The fact that it's a mosque that in a village that does not contain any practicing Muslims in a way, reveals this understanding, this potential understanding of religion, not something that can be understood in oppositional terms, but something that can enrich life of any community, even if it doesn't belong to the specific sect. The church down the road in Muhtara was built as a Maronite church in a village also that doesn't house any Maronites, specifically because the old princes of Lebanon had Maronite friends coming from different religious regions. And they always, they came Saturday and they left that night because they wanted to go pray in their churches. So the Druze Prince built a church for them so they can stay over the weekend. So this idea of religious kind of fluidity that is portrayed in the Umayyad mosque, I think for us describes specifically the Lebanese culture. It's this mix of different layers of religiosity that is a source of I think kind of benefit to the population and it should be seen as such. So we think architecture can play kind of a role in the world of ideas against extremism. Yeah, I think this is a great answer. Totally agree. I mean, maybe one thing I would add is, and in fact, sectarianism itself as was kind of imposed by the nation state only aggravated secularism imposed by the nation state only aggravated sectarianism. So it kind of works in reverse. And I think this idea of religious fluidity is what we are excited and interested about kind of in representing and documenting, but also to go back to the relationship between design and practice. Maybe the present, the lecture presented somewhat a linear narrative, but in fact, we all know that design thinking is not that linear. The mosque was actually really early on in our research. Mosque was built early on in our research of the history of the architecture of the mosque. So probably we would do something very different today. So it's not a linear, it's actually goes back and forth. And I think this is where the practice is able to, the learning experience from the practice is able to feed into what to look for and research and vice versa. But we're also trying, I mean, even when we're looking specifically at the religious spaces like the mosque, for example, the Tawaf is understanding ecology as this new spiritual and religious, imbuing it with a new perspective that is spiritual in nature. So kind of it flows even from one project to the other. I wanted to maybe ask how you brought some of these concepts which obviously enabled you to, you know, design this really fascinating kind of spiritual center at Vassar College. How was that process of insisting that religiosity is fluid, there are layers, it's not a kind of opposition, right? And so you sort of, I'm curious about that process of engaging with different groups and how that conversation happened and how did it, how was it perceived that you were brought in as architects? I'm also curious about that. I mean, it's hard to say we were basically shortlisted and we had to do an interview where we presented the Omayad mosque as a case study and the project really evolves with this dialogue with this multiple clients, 15 different groups and with the director of the center who actually was the one who first asked us to question the kind of the secular religious divide that usually happens within those academic institutions here in the US. But what we find out by having these long conversation with the different groups is that actually the relationship among them is much more permissive and fluid than one would think. And it was more of a kind of a natural extension of that dynamic that already exists on campus among those different groups that led into the kind of the design thoughts that are embedded in the project and not vice versa. And I think it's this idea of moving away from the religious authority and the way they understand and they prescribe practices on their communities and looking at the lived experiences here as with the wealth of knowledge that could produces, not only in terms of the way they appropriate and they use the campus, but also the level of permissiveness that they kind of bring into the conversation. And you've written quite a bit about this kind of understanding of the mosque as a typology of the everyday, right? As opposed to a kind of monument and certainly when the destruction of downtown Beirut in the name of reconstruction was done, the idea of kind of excavating around the mosque to turn it into an icon that is not actually integrated in the everyday is something that I know you've kind of reflected a lot about. So this fluidity is really there. And so I wanted to get back to this quote that I read of this kind of concern with the notion of architectural language and kind of your position vis-a-vis meaning in architecture because clearly you're really engaging with typology with and not that typology necessarily signifies but you are very much embedded with signification or undoing signification. So I wanted to ask about that, including writing, right? And so I mean, we don't really approach the architectural project from standpoint of language but I think we end up producing kind of a specific language to the project just because we are more interested in the typology and kind of configuring the understanding of the typology when we did the mosque, obviously we are learning from the history of the language so to speak of the mosques but for us to kind of subverted and create something that is challenging or kind of questioning this language we in the process create a new understanding of this language. So it's not something that is necessarily as a starting point of the project but it's kind of a subsequent consequence of that research. Yeah, maybe I would add also that although we're not interested in this aesthetic language agenda and the signifier it does, this does not necessarily mean that we're not interested in architectural language as a form of experimentation and maybe more so in the mosque where really the question of ornamentation which has a long kind of orientalist history when mosque has been kind of continuously documented in the late 19th century ornament was always criticized as kind of confusing the aesthetics of the building it's the building lack of rationality so it's always been degrading let's say the architectural quality of the mosque by basically critiquing the ornament and I think we were interested in kind of picking up on that topic and reintroducing the ornament with the words and the meaning of the words within the mosque. Yeah, in a way creating, I mean both in the carpet that we've done as a collaboration with the artist and in the calligraphy that we've put on the outside calligraphy becomes structural in this case. I mean, without it the mosque would fall in a way. And the third thing, I mean, these are two places where we've introduced this new understanding of what calligraphy could mean, for example with the AKG of the carpet. Even the word Allah on the top of the minute was done with a bifolding of the steel plates so that from one side you see God as a solid presence while from the other side you see it as a void kind of alluding to the idea of God rather than a presence. So even playing with these, I mean kind of generic understandings of the trappings of the mosque but understanding them in new ways that could open up doors for experimentation in the typology. So I wanted to ask, continue the kind of question of typology with your house of many vaults which is quite incredible. It's more than a house. I mean, the scale is deceiving because on the one hand it's, you know obviously it slopes down to the ground but on the other hand it's, so you know how is it going to be inhabited? Is it supposed to have multiple families or I'm just curious, it's beautiful project? I mean, the idea again is to re-question the Western notion of the exploded family. I mean, the private house, the small scale house is something that we've been taught at schools kind of to propagate and because it has a minimal impact it's much more kind of condensed to the lifestyle of the family. We found out, contrary, I mean that was our initial kind of approach with the client and then slowly we started to understand that the idea of the extended family in Lebanon is still something that is part of the social structure and that's why it's something that we kind of embraced at the end with the house and the idea is that the patriarch or the father and the mother of the family will have their extended kids family inhabit the house. That's why it has multiple units within the house and we've enlarged specifically the living areas and the dining areas kind of accommodate this large amount of people. I was curious also, you kind of really shared with us how your projects are built and who builds them and the sense of, are you able across the projects to work with craftsmen or with, I mean, what is the relationship to construction that you're engaging in your project? If, you know, what you were able to do with the mosque is that something that you're able to do in other projects or? At a certain degree, yeah, I mean we're always trying to find within the region that we're building craftsmen from that area. So in Nihar, for example, we've worked with stone masons from the area, with millwork people from that area also. Within the trades, I mean, some aspects of the project, it depends, I mean, we try usually, although it's more responsibility on us, but to avoid the idea of a general contractor that will bring his own people regardless of the area that he's working in. When you go with kind of a main contractor with nominated subcontractors, you're able to enforce your own kind of network of people from that area onto the project and this is something that we've tried to do locally. It also depends on the scale of the project. I think there are more resistance and larger scale project to kind of to open up the construction system as such comparing to the smaller scale project. So there's also many challenges along the way. And it's really up to us to push that agenda and it's not usually coming from the clients. So I wanna make sure we have enough time for questions. So one question which I wanna build on in terms of the practice is from an anonymous attendee. Hello, Zia and Makram. I'm curious to hear about your practice situated both in Beirut and in New York City or question mark in between. First, how does that operate practically? Second, what are the disadvantages and advantages of being at once inside and outside of the places where you work and build, especially since this is the position of many Lebanese in the diaspora or Lebanese in Lebanon with antennas outside of the country? I think we had an advantage before ending up into places Makram lived in New York for a long time and we worked together as well for almost more than 10 years and we continue to work remotely today. So it doesn't come without challenges but we've already built dynamic, I guess, in relation that improves on that far distance collaboration. Yeah, I mean, it really depends on kind of extensive talks. I mean, I talk to Zia every day almost and the relationship started before Zoom. I mean, this idea of the long distance relationship got kind of enforced also more recently with the pandemic but the idea is kind of a continuous discussion that happens on a daily basis and that's just a bit. And I think there's kind of a, sometimes there's a disconnect that happens that is beneficial to the project. I mean, specifically with this long distance. So sometimes because it's more verbal, so we throw ideas and somebody misinterprets the idea in a better way than what the person intended it to be. And I think surprises, good surprises come out of it, in a way. Kind of Arabic telephone, isn't that? Apologies for the long question. My question is about the Saleh Barakat Gallery. You preserved the form of the theater but in a way let go of the old program. If it were up to you, how would you have instead preserved such a rich program like a cinema? After your experience with that project, how can adaptive reuse take on more than adapting the shell of a building into a gallery space? How can the adaptation take on more of a position to remember revived signs of progress? I mean, it was interesting for us that we did not lose the cultural aspect of the space. I mean, it was a theater and it's still within the cultural field. What you've tried to do specifically is to kind of keep, as Ziyad mentioned, the trappings of the old theater and the specific beams and the catwalks. But more importantly, designing this staircase that leads you down in a theatrical way I think was kind of an ode to the old program. And we've had the opportunity, I mean, to work with the Saleh Barakat who's the permanent kind of a call a gallerist for local Arab art and who knew Nidal this conversation with her prior to the commissioning to us being commissioned for the project. And she kind of gave him the blessing and kind of also was part of the decision-making process at the beginning of the project. Yeah, so by the time we were hired to come into the project, the space was not a theater anymore. So it wasn't kind of a choice for us to continue. But I think it's a really good question but we were put in a position where the theater was not there and we tried to kind of excavate some of those historic layers of the theater and take advantage of them in the new design. Well, I think it's also interesting what Makram you said. At least it stayed a cultural program and the kind of some of the experience of moving through the space or the beams or I mean, there is a kind of register of the cinema. Had it not been a basement, I mean developers in Lebanon would have turned it into a residential apartment probably. Thank you for this lecture coming from an Arab country. I know that designing a mosque comes with big constraints from working with Imams, the Ministry of Islamic Affairs and the community. How hard was it to convince them with your design and was it in at any stage and was it in any stage more radical that had to be relatively tamed in order to be approved and built? I mean, I want to answer this because it's a very interesting question. We tend to think of religious architecture as something that is dogmatic and we try to kind of deal with this on conceptual level but at the pragmatic level dealing with the religious authority that would give you the permitting for such an architecture. They allow you, I mean, one would kind of understand the monodirectionality to Makkah as something that is very sacred and dogmatic but you can be off by 15 degrees. I mean, if you place the Mahrab off 15 degrees from Makkah it's within the range of what is acceptable. So there's this gray zone within the design of architecture that allows you to recreate what a mosque can be specifically because we've always kind of lectured about the idea of what a mosque is neither dictated by the Quran nor by the hadith. So it's something that has historically been a construct and hence apt for reinterpretation in a way. So another, so I'm going to combine two questions for multi-faith religious projects such as a project at Bazaar to create non-denominational sanctuaries. How do you rely on architectural features rather than symbols? And the other question is with the flexible boundaries of the mosque of the everyday how do you extend the sense of spirituality from the interior to the exterior in cases of outdoor congregation and Friday prayers? Maybe I answered the first one. First, the design that we propose does not relax any of the signifiers or iconography of those different religious groups. Actually, there are no crosses or crescents or any form that we talk specifically about one religious group. Instead, it tries to reconfigure the spaces or they be able to perform the rituals that they need. So it's either the orientation or the organization whether they're arranged in a circle or in a square or a linearity. So the project really doesn't embed any iconography and actually it leaves it up to the user if they want to to kind of populate maybe the walls with those iconographies. And actually we had interesting conversation among the groups that we talked about what kind of iconography is accepted in the space that you're performing if you accept the cross, if you are Muslim praying towards Mecca. And the answer was yes, as long as the cross is behind me and I'm not praying towards it. So there's just really interesting dynamic when it comes to the iconography and the degree of acceptance of those objects within the religious space. So this also has a really interesting long history of with the Spolier and the recycling of material and mosques some of them had crosses kind of embedded in the capital and all they did is kind of the turn the capital away from the visibility of the user and it was fine. So I think it's really interesting in a very gray zone I think that Makram had described it earlier. I don't actually remember the second question. How do you design for kind of outdoor congregation for the kind of everyday space of prayer is really your the carpet, right? Yeah. Makram, I mean, I can say a little bit something about it which is the idea that the sacred is confined to the walls of the mosque is also a construct that we came to accept today. And there's also more porosity let's say where the sacred spills into the city profane and vice versa, religious rituals usually take place in the streets of the city and not necessarily within the building. So this is where kind of the religious spills out and the mosque for instance, as one example is a place where people hang out, socialize and maybe sleep taken up. So this idea that the vision between the sacred or profane is also something that was worth challenging which kind of opens the design potential of outdoor plazas in front of mosque and what could be done with them such as the Sharjah entry that we presented. So we have time. I wanna share two last comments from some of our faculty. The first is from Kristof Kompush, dear Ziyad and Makram, many thanks for sharing your incredibly inspiring and forward looking work proving that it's possible to design across scales from something as humble as a clothing hanger thinking about the first project of yours in New York to what you're doing today. Sorry, Kristof, I'm kind of editing a little bit. Speaking of it, it may be the most fluid, formally and programmatically smaller spiritual and one of the most Instagrammed only surpassed by Sherzahed mosque in Dubai, fully functional mosque there is. Loving this power of smallness and your ground up approach, what would you say changes for you when you have opportunities to scale up projects of spiritual unity, which makes left so unique? So scaling up or not? I think it's a challenge that we're starting to face now, but due to the economic crisis in Lebanon, I think we're safe for a couple of more years with small projects. There's not scaling up, but there's the potential of multiplication of the same scale, right? Aggregating. Yes, aggregating. If you were able to work with a religious institution that owns many mosques, for example, there is this kind of multiply effect potential. Like your house of many vaults is first kind of starting answer, right? To the problem of scale. And from Ada, Tola, Ziad and Makram, so great to have you here with us. Beautiful work, so smart and well conceived. Obviously you always look at things from the left side of the mind, which makes every project a critique and an invention. At once the work on mosques starts as a right to religion. How do you see that moving to the civic realm? The idea of quote, synthetic space is powerful and necessary at this point globally, given our very polarized politics. Can you foresee entering a similar research on a secular public typology? I think it's, I mean, for me specifically, I mean, one of my interests has been kind of the overlap of religiosity with the secular space. And I think Ziad shares the same concern. And this is something that we've tried, not necessarily with institutional, but even with the domestic space, how can we bring in this sort of spirituality? The idea of this revolving door and the room extension that we try to create. This is something that kind of already starts to allude to something that becomes an entry point. I mean, similar to the road shrines that one sees in Lebanon and kind of, as you drive along the different landscapes. This is something that we've kind of learning, in a way, from the religious spaces and trying to apply in the different aspects of our work. So it's kind of this back and forth two-way street that we're trying to navigate. Great. Well, I know it's very late in Beirut and getting late in New York and is early in Asia. Thank you so much for a wonderful talk. It kind of opens up the mind in this time and also I think ends on a sort of optimistic note for how we can come together and how architecture can enable that really wonderful. Thank you both for joining us tonight. I'm sure you've inspired future architects. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. All right, have a good night. Bye.