Cranes that make way into the sky, glass towers, individual houses, edifices in ruins, buildings riddled with bullet holes, ripped off constructions, thriving parking lots, pastel colours, brown concrete, dressed stones, extravagant palaces, green havens…Beirut offers, to the one who still knows how to observe it, different faces layered in a soft slope according to its history. Gazing at the sky, it seems that the capital is not one but many, just like these constructions which diversity is similar to chaos. Wealth of styles or dilution of the capital’ s character ?

Architecture is one of the many expressions of culture: it theoretically reflects an organizational system of the natural and public spaces - a way of life- and it participates in creating the social link. Traditionally elaborated on the basis of geographical, historical, sociological and economic factors, it is an art that is inherently prone to cultural currents. Thus, a construction is the reflection of the evolution of the society in which it sees the day. Being open to the Mediterranean and given its position as link between East and West, Lebanon has always been exposed to foreign influences, to the migration of ideas and people.

Subjected to external dominations, ravaged by years of war, a crossroad of exchanges, the Lebanon of the twenty-first century is witness - in its rural and urban architecture - of a past and a present enriched with layers of History. If the memory of a country is also carved in stone, then what do the constructions that are visible today tell us and how does the landscape of Lebanon appear to be in the future?