Can the care lavished on a project protect it from disaster? Veronica Simpson gets inspired by the origin story of architect Lina Ghotmeh's extraordinary Beirut apartment block, which withstood the dockyard explosion of 2020

摘要

THERE IS A STRANGE but intriguing practice I've heard architects mention, where they ask themselves, in the early design stages, to imagine what their proposed building might look like as a ruin; the idea, I've been told, is to ensure you leave a good-looking ruin. But, perhaps best of all, is to design a building that can survive a disaster intact. Such an outcome was not one the Lebanese-born, Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh was actively looking for when she imagined Stone Garden, a craggy, plant-filled apartment block, its sculpted concrete contours rising 13-storeys high between Beirut's city centre and the docks. But in summer 2020, when a dockyard fire engulfed a nearby warehouse containing ammonium nitrate (which should have been disposed of years before), that building exploded, tragically causing over 200 deaths and leaving a crater 140m wide. Amazingly, Ghotmeh's building remained intact apart from a few broken windows, despite being only a mile from the centre of the blast.