Internationally, two major exhibitions heralded a paradigm shift in contemporary urban problematic: Taking the country’s side, Lisbon architecture Triennale 2019 by Sebastien Marot and Countryside the Future, Guggenheim museum2020, by Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal -AMO.
At the same time, at a local level, a partial, spontaneous rural exodus has begun to take shape due to an acute economic crisis announcing the end of an economic system and a production model. Beirut in its current state is the model of the urban system that has come to an end.
Reasoning with these two major events, we propose to examine this hypothesis through an emblematic architectural project in a rural environment or what we will call: the countryside.
Agriculture and Architecture, two complementary practices of domestication. Our basic hypothesis is that those two fields of concerns should be reconnected and fundamentally rethought in conjunction to each other.
Inhabiting collectively the countryside, has to be invented and programmed according to the new needs. After the urban building and the rural individual family house, a third type of housing system needs to be defined and proposed. The project must be based on a future economic territorial hypothesis of decentralization, activation of local production, agriculture, small industry, farm – Wine, Oil, Clay, Arak, coal… A collective productive living program should be configured: a mist program of dwelling and working. Participative housing, agricultural activity services, small industry with its facilities….
As the modernists announced through their architecture the metropolis and urbanization, this small-scale project attempts to examine a non-urban future. This project will be a prototype of a future reality. The prototype by definition is an architecture that responds to the paradigms of another reality. This project will be at the same time a prototype (or model) and its application in an existing real context.