"Planning as Re-Orientation: Baalbek and Tripoli, c. 1952"

Abstract: While the “urban turn” in international preservation discourse is usually attributed to the reconstruction of European cities after World War II, a number of early postwar missions to Middle Eastern cities also played a crucial role in testing out new principles, notably for “re-orienting” urban life around historic architecture. This presentation takes the Lebanese examples of Baalbek and Tripoli, subjected to competing projects for infrastructural modernization in the 1940s and 50s. Examining the spatial and epistemic roots of “re-orientation” reveals a debt to the embeddedness of public building typologies in the medieval Islamic city, as well as a desire to move past the stark geometries of both Beaux-Arts re-alignments and modernist zoning.

Biography: Lucia Allais is Associate Professor of Architecture at Princeton University. Her book Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: 2018) traces the invention of the cultural monument, as a global building type, from midcentury scenarios of war, modernism, and modernization. Recent articles include “Amplified Humanity and the Architectural Criminal” (Future Anterior) and “Architecture and Mediocracy at UNESCO House” (Marcel Breuer, Lars Müller: 2017). Allais has received a number of grants and fellowships for her scholarly work, including from the CASVA, the Graham Foundation, the Krupp Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute. Before joining the Princeton faculty she was the Behrman-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at the Princeton Society of Fellows. In 2015 she was selected to be the inaugural Detlef Mertins Lecturer on the History of Modernity at Columbia University. She received her BSE in Civil Engineering and Architecture from Princeton, her M.Arch with Distinction from the Harvard GSD and her PhD from HTC at MIT. Allais is a member of Aggregate and an editor of Grey Room.