A sniper's building on the Green Line, kept as it was found, and the closest Beirut has to a museum of its own war.
On the corner of the Rue de Damas — the Green Line — and Independence Street stands a yellow 1924 apartment building shot to pieces and deliberately not repaired.
The building
It was built by the architect Youssef Aftimus and completed by Fouad Kozah, for the Barakat family, in the Beiruti style of the period: a central hall with triple arches, open loggias, and a distinctive plan in which the rear of each apartment is open to the front, so light passes right through.
That plan is why the building matters.
The snipers
When the civil war began in 1975, the Green Line ran along the Damascus road, and this corner was one of the most exposed crossings on it.
The building’s open-through plan meant a sniper could stand deep inside, in shadow, and shoot down two streets at once while being almost impossible to see or hit.
Militias took it, sandbagged it, and cut firing slits into the internal walls. Steel plates and concrete blocks were built up inside the apartments to make protected positions.
All of that is still there. When the building was finally examined after the war, the sniper nests were found intact, with graffiti, spent cartridges, and personal effects. The facade is comprehensively shot through.
The rescue
The Barakat Building was scheduled for demolition in 1997.
The architect Mona Hallak campaigned for years to stop it — arguing that Beirut, which had rebuilt its centre by erasing it, needed to keep one building that showed what had actually happened. She was substantially alone at first, and she won.
The municipality expropriated the building in 2003, restoration by the French architect Youssef Haidar began in 2011, and Beit Beirut opened in 2017 as a museum and urban cultural centre.
The restoration deliberately kept the damage. New concrete and glass were added where structure was needed, in a way that is clearly modern and clearly separate, and the bullet-riddled stone was left exactly as it was.
The problem
It is rarely open.
Since 2017 the building has been the subject of a dispute between the municipality, which owns it, and the campaigners and cultural organisations who envisaged how it would be run. It has hosted individual exhibitions and events and has spent long periods locked.
There is no permanent museum of the Lebanese civil war anywhere in the country. There is no agreed national account of the war at all — it is not taught in schools, the 1991 amnesty law pardoned almost everyone involved, and many of the militia leaders went into government and are still there.
Beit Beirut is the closest thing that exists to a public reckoning, and its intermittent closure is not a coincidence.
Seeing it
The exterior is on a public street and is free. The facade alone, from the pavement, is worth the trip: the scale of the damage is difficult to convey in a photograph.
Check locally whether an exhibition is on. Ask at your accommodation, or look for current listings; the building’s status changes.
The National Museum is fifteen minutes down the same road, and was on the same front line — its film about the concrete is the other half of this story.
The Egg downtown is the third piece.
More History
The Egg and the Green Line
A concrete cinema shell abandoned mid-construction in 1975, and the front line that ran past it for fifteen years.
The Port and August 2020
Two thousand seven hundred tonnes of ammonium nitrate, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded, and nobody held responsible.