Background

Back in 2015, Amale Andraos, Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Hashim Sarkis, Dean of MIT’s School of Architecture + Planning, and Rodolphe el-Khoury, Dean of the University of Miami’s School of Architecture, and Farès el-Dahdah, Director of Rice University’s Humanities Research Center met to discuss how, as a group, they were in an unprecedented position to engage in academic activities that could benefit from their shared Levantine origin.

Since then, Dean Andraos hosted a conference on the Arab City, Rice hosted three symposia on the Arab Nahda, Dean Sarkis has been undertaking research on larger regional formations in the Levant area, and Dean el-Khoury has invited young architects from the middle east to lecture at Miami. When they met again at the New Levant Initiative Conference, it became clear that a concerted effort among them can begin to take shape in the form of parallel Levant related initiatives at their respective institutions. Each initiative would be an opportunity to reflect on the near east, not as a war-torn region of the world but as a trope, or an idea, that ought to take advantage of a successful formula it once employed and that enabled “nearly four hundred years of peace and prosperity.”¹ 

The hope, simply put, is to imagine a new Levant that consists not of nation states but of what was once a network of related, yet diverse, cities, the lingua franca of which was French and their context Ottoman. Together, all four deans and director can begin a nationally relevant conversation on the role that architecture, urbanism, and culture will play in the construction of this new Levant, while cautiously keeping in mind that the buildings we live in are all too often co-opted by unintended or unwanted politics. If the Levant, however, was ever a successfully modern enterprise it was precisely because it was not nationalist and because it made little effort to brand itself consistently across its territory.

What made Levantine cities modern is their very diversity along with a taste for mid-19th century urban interventions that necessarily involved representative forms of municipal organization keen on investing in the public sphere. This included new boulevards, corniches, race-tracks, public gardens, museums, infrastructural services, cafés, etc., to which one might add red light districts and the olfactory background of orange blossoms and Arabian jasmine.

Granted, a shared ambition to promote the vibrant history of Levantine coexistence may not be all that easy to pursue at a moment “when Iraq continues to be stricken with vicious rounds of sectarian violence, when Syria is going through a debilitating civil war, and when Lebanon seems perpetually to be on the brink of sectarian implosion.”² It remains nonetheless evident that the Levant did cultivate a modern idea of coexistence, be it Pan-Arabist or Near Eastern, and that it not only can be seen as having once fostered a resistance movement (against an Ottoman imperial regime riddled with discrimination) but can, once again, become a resistance movement against divisive politics. Cities like Homs, Aleppo, Mosul, and Raqqa will inevitably rebuild and hopefully recover the diversity they once had.