Two decades after civil war blew the Lebanese capital to rubble, the city centre boasts immaculately rebuilt streets lined with Gucci and Prada stores – but the whole place is strangely deserted
Glamorous young couples twiddle their cocktail stirrers on the terraces of Beirut’s Zaitunay Bay, looking out across a balmy evening scene that could be lifted straight from Monaco or Cannes. The lights of glitzy towers twinkle on the water, as a group of teenage girls stroll along the teak boardwalk, posing for selfies in front of freshly polished super-yachts. At the end of the curving esplanade, the jagged form of a new yacht club, designed by shape-making American architect Steven Holl, juts out into the bay, topped with apartments that boast some of the most expensive views in the Middle East. It is “the premier seaside destination for luxury living and recreation,” according to the marketing blurb, “catering exclusively to the region’s cultural and social elite.”
But, as Islamic State fighters gather at the border with Syria to the east, there is an uneasy tension in the air. It is a looming threat that not even a bottle of champagne on the region’s most exclusive terrace can mask. And there are signs that, beneath the veneer of waterfront sparkle, this optimistic image of Beirut’s glory days – revived like a phoenix, 20 years after the civil war blew the city to rubble – might not all be quite what it seems. The city centre now boasts immaculately rebuilt streets, lined with the stores of Gucci and Prada, Hermès and Louis Vuitton, but the whole place is strangely deserted. There are thickets of new apartment buildings, but few lights are switched on behind the curtains.
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Although still wrapped in construction hoardings and topped with nodding cranes, the scale of Solidere’s next phases is rapidly becoming apparent to the west of the city centre, in the luxury residential district of Mina El Hosn. There, the gargantuan staggered cliff-face of Norman Foster’s 3 Beirut complex has now reached its full height of 120 metres, revealed as a fattened wall of three towers spread across an entire city block. The distinctive profile of its neighbour, the Beirut Terraces by Herzog & de Meuron, can now be seen, teetering like a precipitous pile of paperwork on the skyline. Perhaps a stack of banknotes would be a better analogy: the penthouses of this $500m “vertical village of 130 living experiences” will command upwards of $13m a piece. “What if you could be ordered a lifestyle?” asks the development’s promotional website. Judging by the dark windows of the city’s completed residential towers so far, the answer will be of little concern to the investor-buyers, mostly Lebanese expats, who might only visit a few days a year.
And there is more of this on the way. The city model in Solidere’s HQ reads like a Who’s Who of architecture, each developer racing to plant their own luxurious totem pole on the horizon. There is a monstrous slab by Jean Nouvel, thankfully on hold and now unlikely to go ahead, as well as a 315m glass tower planned by Renzo Piano – on a site that specified a 120m height limit. There will also, one day, be a field of tower blocks extending out towards the sea on a 70 hectare area of reclaimed land, which for now lies empty as a dormant wasteland. It is an act of urban vandalism on a monumental scale, erecting a great wall between the bay and sites inland that have enjoyed an elevated view for centuries. It also seems like a perverse move for Solidere itself: once hemmed in by a wall of towers, the value of its own central conservation area will be reduced.