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Before I begin my talk, I would like to confirm what Simone said yesterday: “I too, in my work as an Architect, have never experienced discrimination for being a woman Architect. Except for a recurring question that is asked regularly after I finish explaining the job to a foreman or tradesman or a client: are you single or married? To which I would answer: Why? Does it matter? And the answer would be: just to know if we should call you Miss or Madame! To which I would answer: just call me “Istazet” (meaning Architect).

My presentation is entitled: The Highway: the new public space.

With the event “women who build”, many questions arise about tradition v/s modernity and regional architecture v/s globalization. Fundamental transformations to our lives and the environments we live in are occurring everywhere at a fast pace. To deal with these radical changes, a new way of understanding and evaluating architecture and urban spaces becomes necessary.

This paper attempts to do that, using as starting point a study case done last year by 5 diploma students from Saint Esprit University – Kaslik. Steve eid, Walid Yazbeck, Robert Habr, Anthony Anthonios, Rami Khoueiry.
Their case study surveys a stretch of coastal highway extending from the Beirut Forum till the Nahr el Kalb tunnel. While the conclusions of the survey are of interest, it struck me that it could yield much more than its original scope and intent, in addressing mutations in the public urban space that Lebanese highways have become and their implications on architecture and urban design.

Public spaces have throughout history been a main feature of urban planning; they are the setup for meeting: a space of physical exchange, a space that everybody can use: where you meet friends as well as encounter strangers, compatriots as well as foreigners, where similarity and diversity manifest themselves. The predominantly pedestrian use of public spaces generates a comforting feeling of familiarity and belonging in the user.

Open public spaces promote social encounters and are the scene where cultural manifestations occur. They also host organized communal activities: festivals, celebrations, and commemorations.

Public spaces are also an outlet for public manifestations of displeasure against rules as well as to support rulers. In Italy, popular movements are called movimenti di piazza, and “going down to the piazza” became synonymous with insurrection. When Cardinal Del Monte governor of Gualdo Tadino in the mid 16^th century, saw popular sentiment against the Papal State swell dangerously, he had a spine of houses built in haste down the middle of the main square, dividing it into two and thereby diminishing the space, and effectiveness, of a popular uprising.

Primordial to urban planning and city development, public spaces were created throughout history, in all civilizations, each according to their culture, due to the need of people to interact, to meet and exchange:
- The agora in Greek civilization.
- The forum in Roman cities.
- The atrium of the early Christian basilicas and the sahn of Islamic mosques, all large urban courtyards entered through one or more gates surrounded by porticoes which hosted debates of all nature.

Streets are public spaces in their own right. They are roadways with flanking buildings, sidewalks, street furniture, paving, trees and greenery. They furthermore have an economical function in addition to social significance. The purpose of the street traditionally has been traffic, exchange of goods, encounters, meetings, social exchange and communication.

When the motor car appeared on the scene, new transformations to the street took place:
- The exclusively pedestrian sidewalk was narrowed by the installation of traffic lights, street lighting, parking meters, etc...
- The visual aspect of the road itself changed to fit its new use. Cobblestone road surfaces of old, were replaced with asphalt, more suited to the mobility of the car, with traffic lanes as indications for the car user.
- The zebra crossing (passage clouté) transformed the street into a field of confrontation between pedestrian and car.

The intensive use of the car has irreversibly changed our living environment, which has been re-shaped to allow for this new acquired mobility.

Entire territories are crossed by motorways linking cities, towns and villages extending them linearly and merging them into a continuous urban expanse. Mountains and hills are pierced by tunnels, bridges spanning the gaps of valleys, modifying the natural landscape, thus eradicating the significance of topography.

With the introduction in Lebanon of the motorway “autostrade”, not always taking into consideration the disposition or layout of villages, road edges that are peripheral to villages are projected to the front scene to become the public space for all events to manifest themselves with commerce as main actor, and where architecture develops.

As an example, the mountain motorway that links Antelias to Bikfaya, with emerging road edge large scale commerce is becoming the new urban model in Lebanon. With this new re-focalization of commercial activity along the motorways, village public squares, traditionally the space in front of the church or the mosque, and the hub of all village activity, are as a result marginalized and have become private / public spaces for social exchange.

One of the major highways of Lebanon is the one linking its coastal cities from North to South. In our case study two phenomena take place:
- Over the last 30 years, the coastal towns have expanded laterally and literally to the very edge of the highway.
- Due to the scale of the country  and the proximity of towns, with demographic change, urban “sprawl” and expansion along the highway has caused a continuous merge between Beirut, Dora, Zalka, Jal el Dib, Antelias and so on.

While the vocation of a highway is to meant to connect point A to point B the towns and the cities it encounters, through punctual on-ramps and off-ramps; in our case study, and due to the fact that this highway is neither elevated, nor are its edges with the cities enclosed with a barrier, instead of on-ramps and off-ramps, we get a continuous connection with the adjacent urban expanse throughout the length of the highway. You can literally enter this continuous urban development from any point.

The commercial area of Zalka or any of it’s neighbors now extends to the edge of that highway, and continues all along changing the function of this highway (that was to take you by car from one point to another), and transforming it into a boulevard where you can stop at any point and shop then move on to another point, stop again and continue your shopping with this exception that the sidewalk which witnesses no actual pedestrian activity has become redundant as you do the shopping by car. The only pedestrian activity that takes place is when crossing pedestrian bridges connecting one side of the highway to the other.

The students who made the case study baptized this highway: “Boulstrade” since it is neither an “autostrade” nor a boulevard; instead, it is a combination of both.

When we talk of highways we have to talk about Mobility which refers primarily to physical movement from place to place by means of automobiles. In this instance a new factor comes into play: the pace of this mobility.

The surrounding environment (in our case the Boulstrade) is perceived from the car by the car user at a rapid pace prompting the introduction of a new kind of street furniture that one is able to perceive: The billboard.

The theme of the International Architectural Biennale in Rotterdam which will be held between May 7 and June 7, 2003, will be Mobility and its influence on design and architecture. The title of the biennale is “The car: a room with a view”. In your car, you can listen to music, the news, take language courses, confer on your mobile phone with clients and friends, munch a hamburger acquired at a drive-through fast food restaurant,  receive e-mail, and in general become connected with the world at large, while connecting to the visual world surrounding you and taking stock of the visual images being placed on your path: traffic signs, commercial signs, political statements, fixed billboards, continuously changing electronic billboards, like browsing on the internet; images that bombard you while you evolve towards your destination, all planned to sell you their product and influence your decision making. Visual and subliminal messages with one basic message: Come and buy … is what they say. Buy our product, buy our brand, buy our politics. The only present urban sculpture is a giant shopping trolley filled with giant products with their trademarks actually written on them: the advertising people don’t miss a trick or an occasion to sell. Gone is the comforting feeling of familiarity and belonging that the user of public spaces feels. The user is only a recipient, not a participant.

Even bridges and overpasses are invaded by commercial signs.

If you cross this highway by night at the level of Dbaye, you notice the shocking and disturbing absence of street lighting, the concentration of brightly lit billboards eclipses its role.

It is a new type of urban space where the main exchange is geared for only one type of user: the potential consumer and the only information is publicity.

This constant promotional and advertising bombardment of the car user changes aspect according to the event: social, religious or political manifestations: electoral campaigns, Christmas and Easter decorations… all find their place on this highway.

What is the role of architecture in this case? It is simply expelled and relegated to the back scene; it is no more the all important structuring frame that constitutes the defining edge of the highway, but a secondary layer, more obscure, more withdrawn, less important. The existing buildings get refaced with gigantic advertisements which replace the façade itself in some cases – giant reminders of the insignificance of the building façade and its total submission to the all pervasive consumer oriented atmosphere. 

In this context, what is the future of architecture? New buildings are becoming concentrated points of interest: images striving to compete with these signs - trying to promote their presence. Burger king sets back from the highway and advertises itself with its trade mark columns. The Box-like mall building of ABC, grouping all types of different shops in one area, is wrapped with a façade, a chameleon skin changing in advertisement of each shopping season.

On the other hand and in total opposition to this, some old buildings, and warehouses, now useless in this setup are being emptied on the inside and re-furbished to house the functions that are in demand: showrooms, department stores…shells with façades which royally ignore the precept that “form follows function”. Following suit and in the hope of imitating remodel success stories, other old buildings are hollowed and placed on hold waiting for a new function to appropriate their interior space. As an illustration, I show here one of my early works which was supposed to be a private hospital. Its design is based on what I was taught:  to reflect its function in its facades. The construction was not completed due to the circumstances of the war in Lebanon. Now the project stands as an empty concrete structure, possibly awaiting a new user, a new function. And I ask myself what will be the destiny of its facade? Will it follow the example of its neighbors? or will it carry a giant billboard?

Disregarding the geographical location the same process is invading the sea side of the highway obstructing the sea view, completing the enclosure and isolation of the highway frame.

Furthermore the historical principle of continuity in the built environment is not anymore the model to follow. Nothing stands in front of the creation of a motorway, road or highway. Only speed rules. Saving the heritage becomes only possible in the residual or fragmented part of the city, in what remains after the road network is laid out. New urban forms, new typologies exist that correspond to the evolution of the way of living.

Christian de Portzemparc in one of his conferences talks about the three ages of the city:

Age 1 illustrates the street flanked with adjacent buildings creating compact aligned islands, empty from inside. It is the heritage of the medieval city.

Hybrid forms install Age 2: a brutal rupture derived not from a thought of the city, but a new architecture, the invention of the architectural object. Le Corbusier writes about urbanism in the Athens charter but sees the city through his “immeuble radieux”; the site is just a container for architecture.

But in both Age 1 and Age 2, we still have the idea that the city must be homogeneous. There is still the idea of continuity, not a break, but a shift from classicism to rationalism to modernity. Harmony, beauty, homogeneity, order and regularity are still values in architecture.

Age 3 comes with the awareness that the situations in which we construct are site specific. Each site presents a new problem, resistant to the model. The particular is more important than the recurrent.

The example of our case study contains the seeds of Age 3 and risks becoming generalized and spreading throughout the country.

In this new situation, the architect and town planner should be aware of this new dimension of public space and deal with it from another perspective than the conventional one: this new dimension of public space is no longer pedestrian, but is car based.

We are witnessing the end of a single rational model, used to order the system, the end of the conception of the city as a stronghold. A new context is gradually imposing itself at the global level, a context where the artificial, the electronic / digital tend to replace the physical and the natural. The now accepted local-global pair constitutes less an opposition than the expression of the components of a single process, seeking the stabilization of a new modernity, free, emancipated from the social pressure of history and geographical location.

Is this to be the new image of our cities? the façades, the landmarks, the architecture disappearing behind the mask of advertising? Is this the new role of the public space that this highway has become, with a one way communication from the billboard to the car user? Are these the precursory warning signs of the third millennium?

Divina Abu Jawdeh, Lebanesse architect.

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