OBSERVED
housing
community
architecture
“The difference compensates for the
inequalities the location creates.”
In from the Sea
Traditional fishermen in Lebanon land
a custom-designed community.
In a former radish field on the edge of Tyre, on the southern coast of
Lebanon, an egalitarian community of Catholic fishermen is moving
into a colorful modern housing development. Designed by Hashim
Sarkis, an architect and Harvard professor, the complex transplants
the fishermen far from the coast to contemporary apartments a few
minutes outside the city but is infused with the values that have kept
the community together for generations. “Hashim has taken into
account the way these people live,” says Youssef El Khalil, president of the Association for the Development of Rural Capacities,
which funded the project. “It’s not the kind of design where everything looks like everything else.”
The project’s design and construction spanned a tumultuous
decade. In the past three years alone, the prime minister was assassinated, popular protests caused Syria to end its occupation, an
Israeli air campaign strafed the area, and most recently Hezbollah
shut down the government until it won concessions from the pro-
Western leadership. All politics being local, the fishermen’s housing
crisis had a rather specific relation to the perpetual turmoil: be- The sunny hues of the interior courtyard (below
cause of the never-ending war with Israel, they are prevented from left) are welcoming when glimpsed from outside.
deep-sea fishing in the Mediterranean, making them very poor; and
because UNESCO designated their city a World Heritage Site in 1984,
protecting its 3,000-year-old heritage from bombing and tourist development, they can-
not build up their homes, making them very cramped.
“What happened with that fisherman community is a very sad but inspiring
story,” Sarkis says. “When Tyre was declared a World Heritage Site, everybody thought it would be a good way for the city to live again after it
suffered from the wars and population loss, but it turned out not to
be the case. Ironically, the community that suffered the most
is the one that lives in the old historic city, and that’s primarily the fishermen.”
The main consideration in the design was finding
a balance between the public and private spaces— A 1965 photo of fishing boats off the
maintaining enough openness to create a sense of coast of Tyre, in southern Lebanon
community while preserving the privacy of the extended families sharing two-bedroom apartments. Each of the 84 units has a large
balcony or backyard garden and a separate staircase, and they are oriented around a
shared courtyard. Surrounded areas are planted with ficus, citrus, poplar, and olive
trees as a shield from impending developments and to blend with the agricultural
landscape. Blue-gray paint on the outside and bright yellow in the courtyard mark the
separation between public and private within the complex.
But, at first, the Al Baqaa Housing Cooperative (the name means “to stay” or “to
survive”), formed by the fishermen to realize the project, had a problem with the
design. “When I showed them the unit plans and they saw how different they were
from one another, they said, ‘We wanted them all to be the same—why are they different?’” Sarkis says. “Over a few conversations, I began to understand the problem. They
did not want to create any stratification.”
Sarkis explained that, in order to fit all the units into the site and give them equal
square footage, they had to be different: most of the apartments are duplexes, but the
ones on the corners and facing the street are single story; the ground-floor units have
private gardens instead of balconies, and the top floors get roof access. “The difference
compensates for the inequalities the location creates,” he says. “Once they got that,
everybody became very happy.” —Stephen Zacks #
