Beirut: Ottoman Villas to Concrete Ruins

The floor mosaics on the ground level still carry the marks of the concrete casing that saved them. The building sat directly on the Green Line dividing the city, and the exterior stonework has never been fully smoothed over.

The curve is a single continuous concrete shell, not a dome on a frame. From the Riad El Solh side you can see how the towers it was meant to serve were never built, which is why it sits at an odd angle to everything around it.

Stand where the mosque and the Maronite cathedral next door are in the same frame. The mosque's minarets were built taller than the cathedral's bell tower, and the cathedral later raised its own. The rivalry is legible from the pavement.

Below the cathedral, a section of Roman-era road and Byzantine remains was excavated during the reconstruction and left visible. Beirut has been continuously built over for three thousand years, and this is one of the few places you can see the layers stacked.

The Souk el Tawileh axis follows the pre-war alignment exactly. Compare the stone detailing here with the genuinely old walls at the cathedral you just left; the new work is finer and more regular, which is how you tell them apart.

The clock tower in the courtyard, added in 1897 and restored in 1994. The building is best read from Riad El Solh below, where the hill makes the point about who was meant to be looking down at whom.

The sandbagged sniper nests inside, kept exactly as they were found, and the way the internal walls were breached in a straight line so a shooter could see through the whole building. The facade's bullet damage was consolidated rather than filled.

The stained-glass windows on the garden facade. They were reconstructed after the blast rather than replaced with something new, which is the opposite of the choice made at Beit Beirut a few streets away. Both buildings are honest; they simply disagree.

The triple-arch window group repeated on almost every facade. It is the signature of the Lebanese central-hall house, and once you have seen it here you will find it on ordinary apartment blocks all over the city.

Compare two adjacent buildings. One will have new shutters, repointed stone and a working ground floor; the next will still be propped. The difference is usually who owned it and whether anyone could prove title.

The slabs are five different depths, arranged so the overhangs shade the glass below. Look at the neighbouring towers with their flush curtain walls to see what the deep terraces are doing.

The lattice is not decorative screening; the spacing changes across the facade to control glare on the gallery side and openness on the retail side. Walk the full length outside before going in.

The concrete still carries the grain of the timber shuttering. Khouri designed the furniture inside as well as the building, which is why the proportions of the openings and the fittings agree with each other.

The concrete arch over the experimental theatre, and the way the whole plan is laid out as one continuous curve. Eleven of the eighteen listed structures were assessed as critically damaged at the time of inscription, so read this as a ruin of an unfinished building rather than a restored monument.