The Neutralizing Vessel

ArchiveContributorsCornell Journal of Architecture 11Danny SalamounDensitiesEssayexpanding design practicesFormatsNo DensityPolitics and economicsTopics

Accessibility, Architecture, Architecture as Media, Beirut, Building, Conflict, Demography, Essay, Geopolitics, History, Inequality, Lebanon, Political implications, Post-war society, Symbolic context, Transformation, Urban conspiracy, Violence

This essay is an excerpt from Cornell Journal of Architecture 11: Fear edited by Val Warke from Cornell AAP.

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The war-torn structures of Beirut, Lebanon remain caught between a repressed narrative and a symbolic presence within the city. In the years following the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–1990, Beirut found itself saturated in multiple conflicting narratives resulting in a convoluted reading of its recent past. During this period, the conspiracy theory emerged as a repressed social text while the rifle represented a populous war object. Both dangerous and imbued with contradictory meanings, the conspiracy theory and the rifle shifted between the symbolic and the real. While a conspiracy theory represents both a theory and a fictional story, a rifle symbolizes a neutral order and a deadly disorder. Associations such as fear and control further alter the definition of a rifle and a conspiracy theory. The rifle, in its holistic form, evokes fear, but its meaning dissipates once disassembled. Conversely, a conspiracy theory gains control of reality by extracting semiotic codes for fictitious texts and alternative meanings.