A concrete cinema shell abandoned mid-construction in 1975, and the front line that ran past it for fifteen years.
A grey concrete ovoid sits on a plinth in the middle of downtown Beirut, pocked with shell holes, going nowhere.
What it was going to be
The Beirut City Centre complex, designed by the Lebanese architect Joseph Philippe Karam and begun in 1965.
The plan was a shopping centre with two office towers and, sitting on top of the podium, a cinema — a windowless concrete shell holding around a thousand seats, which is the shape you see.
It was modernist Beirut at its most confident, built in the years when the city was the banking and cultural capital of the Arab world and its architects were producing some of the best work in the region.
One tower was completed. The cinema opened briefly. Then the war started in 1975 and the whole thing stopped.
The Green Line
The Green Line — so called because vegetation grew up through the abandoned street — ran through downtown from the port to the museum crossing, dividing the mostly Muslim west from the mostly Christian east.
The Egg was on it, and its thick concrete made it a sniper and militia position for fifteen years. The shell damage on it is from that.
The rest of the complex was demolished after the war during the Solidere reconstruction. The Egg was left, partly because nobody could agree what to do with it and partly because a number of architects argued strenuously that it should stay.
Since then
It has been used as a venue, sporadically — exhibitions, concerts, art installations — and left empty for long stretches. Ownership is private and the site is valuable.
In October 2019, during the thawra protests, demonstrators occupied the Egg and turned it into a public forum. For several weeks there were lectures, debates and film screenings inside it, and it became the symbolic centre of a movement demanding the removal of the entire political class.
That is the image most people now associate with the building, and it gave the argument for preserving it a force it had not had before.
The argument
Demolish it: it is unsafe, it is unfinished, it blocks a valuable site, and Lebanon has enough ruins.
Keep it: it is a significant work of Arab modernism by one of Lebanon’s important architects; downtown was rebuilt by erasing almost everything that had been damaged, and this is one of the few surviving pieces of physical evidence; and in 2019 it became something else again.
Nothing has been decided. Periodic reports of demolition or of restoration surface and come to nothing.
Seeing it
From the street, and only from the street. The interior is closed, unsafe and fenced.
It is a five-minute walk from Martyrs’ Square.
Beit Beirut in Sodeco and the National Museum are the other two places where the war is physically present, and the three of them together are the only public account of it that the city offers.
On asking about the war
Lebanese people will often talk about the civil war openly, and often will not, and the difference depends on the person rather than on anything you can predict.
The 1991 amnesty pardoned almost all wartime crimes. There is no agreed national narrative, it is not taught in schools, and many of the people who led militias are still in politics. Around 17,000 people are still missing.
Follow the conversation rather than starting it.
More History
Beit Beirut
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.
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.