A series of dreadful events have unfolded consecutively since the beginning of the year 2020. The severe economic crisis in Lebanon, the coronavirus pandemic and the latest atrocious explosion at the port of Beirut has changed life as we know it.
At the moment, Beirut needs emergency assistance and a disaster relief strategy while all aspects of life have been affected and aren’t functioning any longer as they used to do due to the Coronavirus pandemic. What will life post 2020 disasters look like? And how are we going to “live” it?
This studio attempts to envision an answer to “living post 2020” and to understand the changes that have affected all aspects of life from home, to education, work, health care, entertainment etc… how can we visualize a reconstruction of Beirut knowing all the possibilities of a continuing pandemic and perhaps a reoccurrence of other ones? How can reconstruction propose a safer home? How can the disaster teach us for a better future living? Interior architecture will need to understand these newly imposed conditions and propose adequate and imaginative strategies to respond to a different future life.
Within our crawling fears of all the imposed changes we look for the persisting: is there any permanent anchor to which we can attach other temporary realities? Our strategies in this studio investigate how is space adapting to the questions of temporary as opposed to the permanent and re-think the responses that interior architecture can provide.