From the Mountain to the Sea: Architectural Excursions in the Lebanese Landscape

In the 1960's, Lebanon's National Tourism Council promoted the slogan "From the mountain to the sea" as an advertisement of the country's attractiveness and striking geographic characteristics. The slogan fostered an urban myth, proposing that in Lebanon's overlapping winter and summer seasons a fortunate tourist might ski in the Faraya Mountains and then, after only an hour's drive, follow that activity with a dip in the Mediterranean Sea. In Lebanon's modernizing, post-colonial state, this mythologized geography was declared open for business: from the mountain resorts of the winter to the Mediterranean beaches of the summer. Soon, however, this frictionless landscape faltered, fracturing under the pressures of a long sectarian civil war, the subsequent period of reconstruction, and a series of local and regional religious conflicts. What remains is a fragmented, sectarian geography--a perforated landscape containing pockets of hope and despair.

Through thirteen of L.E.FT Architect's Lebanese projects, located across an east-west isoline running from the mountain to the sea, the monograph interrogates the heroic mythologies of Lebanon's landscape, reading them against experiential narratives from specific moments and environments. The book's structure interlaces representations of built work with revealing anecdotes, narrating stories of distress, but also striving to project moments of resilience in a whimsical architectural resolution that embodies both.

The projects contained within this monograph are all sited within a region that has frequently been understudied or under-described in contemporary architectural discourse. Historically, within disciplinary conversations, its architecture has been positioned as belonging to an idealized distant past, or aestheticized through the lens of the supposed permanent trauma of the war. Intersecting with a diverse array of landscapes, communities, and programs, these thirteen projects provide exposure to the active architectural practices and conversations taking place within Lebanon today.