Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism

PLATAU | 2019

About the Seoul Biennale

The Seoul Biennale first took place in 2017 and has been finding its own place in the international architectural scene for bringing valuable themes and discussions into today’s architecture and urbanism agenda. This year’s Biennale, directed by Jaeyong Lim and Francisco Sanin, under the main theme “Collective City,” will present thorough research and debate on the future of cities around the world.

About PLATAU

platau | platform for architecture and urbanism | were invited for this year’s Biennale to represent Beirut. For a period of 6 months,I interned along with Sabine Dina, Mariana Boughaba, Reem Falakha and Lynn Tannir on developing the project under the direction of Sandra Frem and Boulos Douaihy.

Project Brief

Since the end of the civil war, Lebanon’s polarized politics cultivated a deliberate vacuum of the public realm and collective practices, evident in the lack of public spaces in Beirut, and their neutralization through excessive control, filtered access and neglect. Yet with the rise of the information age and personal access to technology since the early 2000s, previously inaccessible ways of collective expressions became possible, that broke away from established political and confessional definitions.
In such context, Creative Collectives looks at the spatial history of the collective in Beirut, re-charting all initiatives and manifestations that can be dubbed as communal- from political to social and economic- and their expressions in the city’s urban space from the year 2000 until the present..
Secondly, the project investigates emerging forms of collectives in the city; looking through mappings and footage at Beirut’s creative and entrepreneurial clusters. Operating at the intersection of private and communal initiatives, such practices in Beirut have slowly but steadily inhabited existing buildings and provided alternatives for collective experiences, mostly invaluable in a city where the public realm is fragmented into filtered archipelagos.
The project imagines a speculative future where Beirut can be overlaid by a network of nodes -Creative Collectives- that hold specific criteria for collectivity: the creative re-appropriation of vulnerable urban fabric and open spaces to host a positive negotiation between conservation, individual modes of practice and collective experience.

Work Focus

Timeline |

Extensive research in archives and websites about Beirut’s collective events in the past 20 years, the catalysts behind them and their use of Beirut’s urban spaces. The events were divided in Political and Social, to study the relationship between them.

Archiving all events into categories, dates, attendees and locations.

Graphical representation of the results.

Practices | w/ Mariana Boughaba

2D and 3D mapping and visualization of chosen creative and entrepreneurial clusters

Archiving and Graphical representation of their activities

Animating calendars showing these clusters in action throughout the years.