Cities are incubators and engines of the economy. But in our effort to turn the city into an attractive environment, we drove the industry out of the city, turning it into a place of consumption without production. How can we rethink Beirut as a City of Making? This project injects Beirut’s residential fabric with urban manufacturing nodes, catalytic of new proximities between living and working in order to revive the city and more precisely the productive side of Beirut. Combining housing with industry asks for new architectural compositions, that lead to new typologies of embedding living, manufacturing, and giving back to the community.
Set at the edge of Sin El Fil and bordering a leftover river bank, the project embeds manufacturing into its base and links through a multileveled ground floor Sin El Fil to riverside communal gardens. The housing units’ typologies are compiled in a way to leave porosities throughout the volume that receive collective programs, linked in a vertical spine that extends communal space up into the project.