RIBA President's Medals 2024: Nathalie Marj Awarded
© 2024 EPFL
Nathalie Marj, an architecture student at EPFL, has been awarded the RIBA Awards for Sustainable Design and received a special mention for the RIBA Silver Medal for her master’s project “Protocols for Beirut’s Unbuildable Lots: Designing Non-Sectarian Spaces.” This project explores innovative solutions for non-sectarian public spaces in Beirut, addressing crucial environmental, social, and economic sustainability challenges in a complex urban context.
For 188 years, the RIBA President’s Medals have recognized the best student work in architecture worldwide. This year, out of 372 submissions, Nathalie’s project stood out for its response to key sustainability challenges while imagining non-sectarian communal spaces within a complex urban environment.
"Protocols for Beirut’s Unbuildable Lots: Designing Non-Sectarian Spaces", Nathalie Marj
In a city as dense as Beirut, where public spaces are scarce, securitized, and feared, the project Protocols for Beirut’s Unbuildable Lots maps potential spaces for non-sectarian commons. Building upon the theoretical statement Untangling Beirut's Sectarian Geographies, which tackled how sectarianism spatializes in Beirut, the thesis identifies, categorizes, and catalogs Beirut’s unbuildable lots. These sites, anomalies in the urban fabric that escape sectarian development, are too small and awkward in shape to be constructed by law. Paired with material, legal, and logistical tactics, this non-exhaustive atlas of spaces is created as a toolkit for Beirut’s dwellers to reclaim agency as actors of their built environment.
Different insertions meander around the inconstructibility of the sites, leveraging existing elements and resources through non-invasive structures. By retrieving and making visible vacant and municipal land, they answer the need for common civic spaces in Beirut. Navigating sectarian geographies and the intricacies of infrastructures, and real estate, the designs become secular and mundane structures of daily life. Within these divided geographies, dwellers negotiate to find space for alternative collective narratives on the fringes of sectarian planning. Through this, the lots – representing around 1% of Beirut’s surface – emerge as interstitial openings for potentially disruptive mobilizations, creating thresholds within the divisions in which the Lebanese operate.
Architecture Master Project 2024, EPFL
Supervision: Prof. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (RIOT), Prof. Yves Pedrazzini (LASUR) et Nagy Makhlouf (RIOT).
The full project is available on the Living Archives.
