Loading ...The Ruined Apartment Building Becoming Beirut's Memorial to Civil War
Places have some kind of memory,” the late writer WG Sebald once told me, “in that they activate memory in those who look at them. It’s an old notion: this isn’t a good house, because bad things have happened in it.”
These words came to mind as I had a preview tour of Beit Beirut (Beirut House), a ruined beauty of a Levantine apartment building, in the Lebanese capital’s Ashrafieh district, that is to become an extraordinary Museum of Memory. A four-storey landmark on the corner of Independence Avenue and Damascus Road, its yellow walls are pitted and pockmarked by bullets and mortars from the civil war of 1975-1990.
Earmarked as a centre for modern urban history, from when Beirut was the “Paris of the East”, the building – formerly known as Beit Barakat or the Yellow House – will also be Lebanon’s first publicly funded museum of the civil war that ended 25 years ago.
Source: europe.newsweek.com