George Arbid is trying to save buildings from disappearing twice: first from the city, then from memory.
That work is at the centre of A Journey into Architecture Archives: Baghdad, Damascus, Tunis, a new exhibition commissioned by Sharjah Architecture Triennial at Al Qasimiyah School.
Led by the Lebanese architect and researcher, it brings together drawings, photographs, models, documents and newly commissioned films that trace the built histories of three Arab cities through structures that still stand, those that have been altered or threatened, as well as projects that never left the page.
Arbid, founding director of the Arab Centre for Architecture in the Lebanese capital, previously curated the 2023 show on Beirut, Cairo and Rabat. This new instalment unfolds between archival tables and a multimedia space, with private and institutional archives from 1930 to 1980 set alongside newly commissioned films and architectural models that show where some of those buildings stand today, and how they were originally designed.
Arbid describes the work as part architectural research, part investigation. He follows buildings and designers through drawings, articles, family papers and building histories, looking for people who may still hold a missing file, a forgotten photograph or a memory that explains what happened to a place.
“What I want this exhibition to do first of all is show the richness,” Arbid tells The National. “You can see it as a messy table on which there is paper. But when you look closer, you may say: I saw this housing project here, but let me compare it to the housing project in the other country and see which one came first.
“Was there any influence from this one to that one? I hope the viewer or visitor can do that on their own.”
In Baghdad, that research led him to a house built in 1936. Designed by Syrian architect Badri Qaddah on behalf of Kamil Chadirji, the prominent Iraqi politician and father of pioneering architect Rifat Chadirji, the house belongs to a period before Iraq’s better-known postwar modernist movement.
The accompanying film follows Arbid as he visits the house with Chadirji’s nephew after it had stood empty for years. Inside, they find a box untouched for decades. It contained a 1936 contract with the builder, construction dates, notes on when the windows were installed and the concrete was poured. Copies of the documents are displayed in the exhibition.
“What I exhibit here, for example, is a sheet of paper that seems to have no particular importance,” Arbid says of another document in the show. “But it has a very interesting piece of information.”
For Arbid, such material can change what is known about a building: who commissioned it, how it was made and where a researcher should look for it.
“This is to say that in archives, there are pieces of information that are very important for the story, but are not necessarily mainstream information,” he says. “The whole story is not written only in the drawings. It is written in oral history, in administrative documents, correspondence, letters and all sorts of documents.”
Also in the Baghdad section are Chadirji’s Tobacco Monopoly Offices and Stores, designed in 1966. The administrative and industrial complex is among his better-known works. Early cylindrical sketches on display show how Chadirji treated even a utilitarian commission as an opportunity for architectural experimentation.
“The sketch shows the vision and where he is heading,” Arbid says. “What is great about this is that you go from the scribble to the sketch, to the plan, to the etching of the elevation, to the photographs.
“He was Iraqi, and there is this architecture of bricks. The cylinders come from there in his designs. But it also has the other aspect, which is modern space: freestanding planes, freestanding volumes, freestanding walls. It is a combination.”
In Damascus, the research led Arbid to cinemas, where the archives offer glimpses of Syrian cultural life in the 1950s and 1960s. Among them are plans for Cinema Al Zahra, a project by architect and civil engineer Farid Trad. The drawings show an interior concrete gable, unusual at a time when such spans were more often built in steel.
Another Damascus project, Al Sufara, was designed by Syrian architect Nizar Al Farra with Albert Sayegh and Nizar Al Murady. The surviving material shows a building designed not only around its hall and facade, but around the practical mechanics of cinema-going. Its poster panel could rotate, allowing staff to change the advertising from inside the building rather than from the street.
For Arbid, the cinema drawings reveal both social life and engineering. In the case of Cinema Al Zahra, they show that the building contained two cinemas stacked one above the other, a detail he says is not widely known.
“The cinema was also a place where you displayed the latest technological knowledge. A cinema is a big hall without columns, so you are also in the history of construction and materials," he adds.
“The poster on the facade actually revolves. It has a mechanism, so they can put up the posters without having to use a crane on the street. It revolves inside the attic of the first floor, and then they put it back in place. It does not work today, but at least the intention is there.”
In Tunis, the question of what survives becomes more urgent. Hotel du Lac, designed by Italian architect Raffaele Contigiani and completed in 1973, is known for its inverted form and exposed structural presence. The hotel has fallen into severe disrepair, and Arbid says parts of it are now being dismantled.
For the exhibition, he built a model revealing the structural system hidden beneath the building: deep piles extending up to 60 metres into sandy ground.
“Through an installation, I am trying to explain that this building would not have stood if it had not been built on these piles,” he says. “This is the hidden part, and we get this from the stories told in archives.”
After the exhibition closes, the commissioned films will become a permanent online resource, making the material available to architects, researchers, residents and preservationists.
“In Baghdad, Damascus and other places, there are still things and the stories are still there,” he says. “You only need to go and find them, dig them out and put them on a table, in a film, in a story, or do something about these buildings.
“Archives are there as a message telling us: this is what was, and let us see what we can do with it today.”
A Journey into Architecture Archives: Baghdad, Damascus, Tunis runs at Al Qasimiyah School, Sharjah, until July 12; Saturday to Thursday, 9am to 9pm; Friday, 2pm to 9pm
