30 YEARBOOK 2022 not a single building should be kept that would remind people of the civil war, as there should be no need to preserve such a painful memory (Becherer 2005: 18; Sandes 2010: 86). The initial plan to restore some facades was replaced by a desire for collective amnesia. More often than not, Solidère’s work has been excoriated by critics as an urban planning failure and a financial disaster which wrecked an opportunity to bring the Lebanese together after the war. It has often been judged as one of the many disappointments of a post-war period that has seen more conflict, more disarray and further fragmentation (Ragab 2012). Many protests took place when Solidère’s mission became apparent to the wider public. Protests were against a number of issues: expropriation of property; the clear profit orientation of the project that did not correspond to public interests, and the lack of democratic principles and public control. The actual architectural design of much of the plan included oversized highways and skyscrapers, and use of a uniform and hostile architecture; the centre was gentrified and divided from the rest of the city. This included the turning of Martyrs’ Square into a highway that would effectively reinforce the divisions of the civil war (Bustani 1993; Becherer 2005, 2016; Ragab 2012). These objections were generally fought out in the media (Schmid 2006: 376; Sandes 2010: 86). TREATMENT OF HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY IN CENTRAL BEIRUT Many historic buildings of central Beirut suffered damage, including the Grand Serail, the Military Hospital and the Ottoman Clock Tower, the Municipality building and other French Mandate structures of the Place de l’Etoile, religious buildings including the Mosque Al Omari, originally the twelfth-century Crusader cathedral of St John, and its neighbour Mosque Emir Mansour Assaf; Mosque Majidiye; the Ottoman Amir Munzer mosque, the cathedrals of the Greek Orthodox St George, Greek Catholic St Elie and Maronite St George. All of these have since been restored. The National Museum, sitting at one of the main checkpoints of the Green Line but outside the BCD, suffered severe damage. It was re-opened to the public in November 1997 after extensive refurbishment. From the Martyrs’ Square’s numerous cinemas, only the Opera was restored. It now exists as a Virgin music megastore. Beirut’s more modern architecture, that of the 1950s and 1960s which helped to construct an identity for a young post-colonial republic, has been almost entirely disregarded. A rare survivor is the City Center Building or ‘The Egg’, designed by the Lebanese architect Joseph Philippe Karam and built in 1965 on the west side of Martyrs’ Square. It is one of central Beirut’s most iconic buildings though it remains a shell since the war. Until recently it was planned to renovate it into a cultural entertainment centre (of which there are none as yet in the BCD). Its future, however, is again threatened by the development plans of Abu Dhabi Investment House which bought out the plot (along with seven other sites) and declared the retention of the building as ‘non- viable’. At the end of the war the law in place to protect Lebanon’s cultural heritage was the 1933 Law of Antiquities, implemented by the French. While it was not designed to deal with modern developerled urban archaeology, it could have offered an adequate level of Post-war (1990s) reconstruction in Central Beirut: one historic monument of Imam Ouzai was saved amidst new construction of historic Beirut souks.
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