.....some urban observations of Beirut for Urban_October 2015
...While Brilliant Beirut was curated at Dubai Design Week
" as a chronological journey, the exhibition was a showcase of the city’s most prominent design and architecture achievements, illustrating all the important milestones of the city’s design history. The visitor's journey (which was staged as a series of long boulevard-like corridors) began in the flourishing 1950s, when the Hotel Carlton (1957) and the Pan-American Building (1953) rose to dominate Beirut’s skyline and the Cinema al-Hamra was constructed on Hamra Street (1958); also the same time when Lebanon’s first group of architects such asGeorge Rais, Assem Salam, Khalil Khoury and Karol Schayer emerged. Moving forward to the maturing era of the1960s, which came hand-in-hand with an economic boom and the formation of new companies, the first “starchitects” such as the Finnish Alvar Aalto and Polish Karol Schayer arrived in the city."
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