Lebanon’s coastline on the Mediterranean is one of its main geo-morphological features, a thin strip flanked by Mount Lebanon of around 500 m [0.31 mi.] in width, stretching along the entire length of the country for 240 km [149 mi.]. The coast from the south to the north is geologically rich and diverse, varying between sandy beaches and shallow waters, to rocky beaches with deep water coastal edge.² Although historically it was mostly developed as agricultural fields for citrus, olives, and banana production, which stretched between its main coastal cities, its productive value shifted since the 1950s towards real estate development, where private developments were built  over the public sphere and altered the coast’s natural ecology.³

After a 1983 decree which permitted real-estate companies to develop the coast, large scale high-end developments were put forward through special decrees, especially during and after the civil war ⁴ and extending outside the peripheries of Beirut.⁵ Developments such as Linord, Solidere Beirut Waterfront, and Dbayeh Waterfront, offered only high-end residential and commercial programs, and were further planned on reclaimed land, detrimentally re-shaping the coastal morphology and ecology.⁶ However, more than 85 percent of the Lebanese territory, including its coast, remains today without urban planning directives.⁷ Moreover, the coastal edge is legally public domain, however the continuous and illegal privatization of the coast by adjacent lots with illegal landfills, resulted in large portions of the coast, especially in the sprawl area surrounding Beirut, to be inaccessible to the public.⁸ 

Beirut, the capital and the country’s biggest city, has a large urban fabric extending continuously beyond the limits of its municipal boundaries. The greater Beirut suburbs include dense agglomerations spreading out of the 

city and sprawling over the adjacent coastline and mountains. 

Land use and activities at the coast specifically north and south of the city, incorporate mixes of industrial, agricultural, and touristic functions, which are separated from the residential neighborhoods inland by the main coastal highway. From Beirut’s commercial port to the north, stretches of industrial zones, commercial buildings, fuel stations, to high-end developments and the mostly vacant Dbayeh Waterfront city, line the edge where the sea is mostly inaccessible and polluted, as it is intermittently privatized by these developments and heavily contaminated by adjacent industries. 

The Zouk coastal strip, which falls under the two towns of Zouk Mosbeh and Zouk Mikael, is situated in this northern stretch, in the Keserwan district 14 km [8.7 mi.] away from Beirut. The morphologically protruding rock of the Nahr El Kalb river, historically created a boundary between Keserwan, a predominantly Christian area, and the adjacent Dbayeh suburb and Beirut. This coastal strip is cut from the larger municipal limits of Zouk Mosbeh and Zouk Mikael by the main coastal highway (Fig. 1). The area forms a very particular zone where the clash of the natural coastline, private touristic developments, agricultural history, and industrial zoning, produce varied environments with dysfunctional in-between spaces. The area prior to the 1960s was vastly agricultural in nature directly adjacent to the delta of the Nahr el Kalb river ⁹ and known for its mulberry and sugar cane plantations that were later replaced by citrus and banana trees (Fig. 2), and where local famers and their families had an immediate connection to the sandy beach. In 1956, a gas power plant was built on this coastline,¹⁰ which was later adapted to fuel in the ‘80s with two large polluting exhaust towers creating a main visual intrusion on the coast. 

The term ecology, as observed in the context of Zouk, is understood from the material sense, as different embedded systems that encompass human, natural, or technological aspects. In his reflections on Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), Stan Allen ¹³ uses the term “material ecologies” to differentiate ecology from the necessarily “natural” and suggests instead a more synthetic reading that intersects the natural and the artifice. 

From a similar framework, the area of Zouk is understood through its different material ecologies, seen as disparate and co-existing systems that have kept the area in a derelict condition. 

Those include the industrial and often abandoned factories, the interstitial agricultural fields, some of which are abandoned, the power plant facility, and the private beach resorts with sports and leisure activities. Each one of these programs is understood as a separate ecology, as it incorporates its own systems, logistics, connections and operations. Each ecology loosely operates on its own, connected only through the road system to the main highway, without any necessary interaction between the adjacent zones, beyond sharing bordering limits. The underlying natural ecology of the area also forms another layer of this reading, appearing through the occasional residual terrain, or at the narrow coastal edge by the sea, or by the river and its riparian edge. Heavily polluted, derelict or inaccessible, most of the remaining natural sites are excluded from any form of productivity. 

At this micro scale, the Zouk coast presents a case of exclusion between the different ecologies and the derelict landscapes (Fig. 3).

However, due to the exclusivity of the beach resorts, pollution, and the derelict state of the industrial and agricultural facilities, the area remains semi-isolated and desolate.

Although in this decrepit state, the area still holds further potential in its location and relative proximity to Beirut. Despite these different separations and the derelict state of the area, the different material ecologies present an accumulation of potential spaces and possible productive areas. In his essay “Terrain Vague” (1995), Ignasi de Solà-Morales 14 presents the “vague” or the undefined space, as one which designates both the vacant and the free, where absence yields the promise of possibility. The link thus between the derelict and a new potential is important, however if the new possibility for the area is evolved out of its existing environments rather than superimposed over them.

Within the scales of disconnection evident in the site, and from an agile design framework, the studio proceeded towards creating ecological hybrids that propose new unifying natures of leisure, infrastructure, and production. The pedagogical approach pushed for evaluating the site as a continuous field rather than distinct plots, using theoretical readings, iterative abstract models, and composite representations. Each project, developed by a group of two students, involved scalar projections of macro and mid-scale interventions, which included intermeshed architectural, infrastructural, and landscape components. The scalar approach started from the macro strategy for the overall site, stratifying the site’s multiple layers and existing programs, and then developed towards the medium scale in a specific site of focus. 

Students researched the various shaping layers of the area, including history, ownership, and zoning, landscape and coastal typologies, modes of formal and informal leisure, existing infrastructural systems, production and agricultural conditions, and pollution’s devastating impact. Each strategy was developed as an operative system, a field condition, that encompasses architectural typological investigations, landscape and productive systems, and infrastructure. 

Three main driving strategies at the different imbedded scales guided each student project at ecological, morphological, and programmatic levels: renaturalization, transformation of the in-between, and agile programing. 

The first strategy, renaturalization, included re-instigating lost coastal ecologies and reintegration of native landscape types. Students approached new landscape interventions as necessarily active and productive systems able to have a performative role for the expanded environment (the built and the unbuilt). 

In the second strategy, in-between sites were looked at as potential connectors and as thresholds of transformations that can manipulate the various differences into an operative fusion. They were observed as sites of interstitial opportunity, where morphological and spatial transformations allow potential synergies. Instead of shutting off one program from the next, reactivating the in-between sites and redesigning existing boundaries as spatial connectors can reconnect the disintegrated area.

With agile programing as a third design strategy, alternative usages and more current types of activities were imagined from existing ones. This included new forms of contemporary leisure that build on the site’s existing formal and informal usages, more adaptable agricultural practices and new types of production, and the inclusion of more sustainable energy, water, and transportation systems.

The emergent hybrid results by the students each focused on a specific lens of operation, reframing the three aforementioned strategies through distinctive agendas and thematics. Furthermore, the studio pedagogy oscillated between visual experimentation and abstract “field” models to translate the different strategies and site dynamics at each of the scales of operation. The abstract models formed the in-between phase, the translation from research and analysis into the first formal and conceptual interpretations (Fig. 5). Through the iterative models, students worked on two main scales of operation, as previously mentioned. The macro scale involved the strategic reimagining of the area through its systems and infrastructure, and the mid-scale further developed the iterations as formal armatures that include spatial, landscape, and programmatic intersections. From these two scales, the students then developed fully the more micro architectural scale, detailing its spatial components, material, structure, and landscape attributes.

The second project used water as a guiding design system, where existing water flows formed the starting point of the design. The students looked at the existing natural aquifers in the hill, the adjacent contaminated Nahr El Kalb river, the rainwater runoff on the road infrastructure, and the resulting pollutants that affect the site from organic waste to plastic residues (Fig. 8).
These various systems formed the basis for designing an ecological landscape and water infrastructure, that reforms the coastal area as a biodiverse productive field, and that connects the upper hill area to the lower coast through water channels, filtration, and collection points. At the macro scale (Fig. 9), their vision encompassed a hybrid ecological field integrating these water systems with agriculture, filtering landscapes, and renewable energy stations. Programs such as a public park and marine museum, a public aquarium, and agri-tourism, allowed both leisure and productive capacities. Manipulations of the coast resulted in new delta conditions that would re-allow biodiverse flora and fauna to grow. At the mid-scale (Fig. 10), their water collection scheme benefited from the adjacent slopes to collect rainwater down to a hybrid filtration station that integrates within the highway roundabout and that serves as a connective pedestrian crossing between the two sides of the highway. This station redistributes water to the lower fields, allowing irrigation and clean water flow down to the sea.

This spine would equally help reactivate existing programs of beach resorts, restaurants, and retail that are spread on distinct portions of the site. At the macro level, the students integrated revived landscapes that overtake existing abandoned structures and the polluting powerplant and elaborated on new forms of leisure that adapt to the various conditions of  the interstitial sites. These programs varied from an informal public beach area, a reconstituted agricultural field area, a botanical garden, a water sports, playground, and skate park area linking to the adjacent resorts. 

Their developed mid-scale proposal focused on the botanical garden (Fig. 12), developed as a field of rolling landscapes with native flora. The hybrid scheme integrated with abandoned factory buildings on site, inserting in them indoor programs that support the botanical garden from exhibition spaces, a visitor’s center, to a gift shop (Fig. 13).

From a pedagogical perspective, the studio allowed the students to engage in a holistic manner with an ecological design framework on an uncharted site by the coast. The research and mappings developed by the students enabled them to understand the different social, cultural, environmental, and infrastructural layers of Zouk, and their implication on the area’s current state. 

From a design and formal level, the scalar method allowed students not only to investigate the different layers of the site, but also to tackle them at multiple levels of complexity. Macro issues, such as dynamic flows of water shed or sea currents, or public domain disintegration from a cadastral level, became the design instigators for the students’ macro strategy, and the regulating system for their new synthetic field. Through zooming in, the resolution of understanding site specificities and disconnections, including the resorts’ thresholds, coastal edge morphologies and environmental conditions, and abandoned industrial structures, became a key aspect to interconnect the different site ecologies, and formulate a unified vision for the area. Furthermore, the methodology of using abstract “field” models as a way to induce formal and typological alternatives for the site, enabled students to conceive their projects as continuous systems, encompassing multiple public activities and productive landscapes.

From a programmatic and ecological level, the student work presented here each approached the ecological problematics of Zouk from a different perspective. Initiating from the toxicities affecting the site, the first project enhances the coastal rejuvenation and the re-growth of marine ecosystems, while promoting filtration through landscapes and bioswales as alternatives. The second project develops new regulating landscapes that enhance water shed and water collection for the area, while promoting agri-tourism and marine leisure programs for the general public. It also centralizes water infrastructure as a connective pedestrian and vehicular spine, crossing over the highway boundary, and linking back the suburbs to the coast. The third project highlights the site’s characteristic as a touristic and commercial spine, building on this potential to propose interstitial interventions and new public, while enhancing the natural environment, and addressing slow and fast mobility issues. Finally, the fourth project, expands on the notion of public domain, turning the residual slivers into activated areas that stitch the different site thresholds through a new gaming landscape, and promoting a new economic model for the site, with transportation network, and playful landscapes.

Despite the fact that some projects delved into more conceptual investigations that might seem unrealizable, however they offer speculative alternatives that could set the way for new modes of productivity for the site. Whether it is productivity through water, energy, agricultural or marine produce, the different projects allow the possibility of new forms of leisure and landscapes to take shape in the site, while retaining its existing systems and ecologies. 

The studio thus attempted to form a new synthetic alternative, developing from the site’s existing natures and its latent differences as moments of opportunity. It attempted to question the site’s divisions and barriers at their different scales of disconnection, suggesting new fluxes that can override current practices, and reposition the area as a potentially biodiverse field serving both the community and the natural environment. The aim was to give a viable alternative that turns away from real estate as the only operative mode of development, to suggest instead other productive and economic practices that can sustain the area and its ecology. By imagining new modes of development, production, and leisure, and by situating landscape and architecture as inherently symbiotic practices through an agile ecological approach, the studio work presented here aimed for a possible re-naturalized and conjoined future for this neglected coast of Zouk.