The Natural & the Technological

The studio’s premise focused on the inevitable impact of technologically driven development on the built and natural environments, and resource extraction on the living landscape. This is particularly evident in Chekka, Lebanon, where the production of cement and industrialization have radically reshaped the natural hills with effects far stretching to the neighboring coast, towns, and ecosystems. The studio thus worked to develop an ecological design approach, where landscape and architecture are considered as integrated and mutually symbiotic systems that operate within a larger social, cultural, infrastructural, and environmental framework. The students worked on the areas of Chekka, Al Heri, Bednayel, and their surroundings as potentially rich ecological, cultural, and economically viable areas in dire need for a comprehensive redesign and a re-naturalized vision.

Joint undergraduate studio between Architecture and Landscape architecture programs at the American University of Beirut - co-taught with Nayla Al Akl