While Dubai may be making a valiant play for the title, it is Beirut that has so far served as the region's de facto design capital.
To understand Beirut's creative prowess, one needs to look at its history, says Rana Salam, who has been tasked with curating an exhibition entitled Brilliant Beirut for Dubai Design Week, as part of the Iconic City series. The exhibition, which will be shown in Dubai Design District's building 7 from October 26 to 31, charts the evolution of design in Beirut from the 1950s until the present day, pinpointing the pivotal moments, designers and achievements that have helped build the city's reputation for progressive design.
Salam has identified the country’s independence in 1943 as a key turning point in Beirut’s creative history. “After independence, which is what I illustrate in this exhibition, Lebanon, like many countries that come out of a colony, was very much ready to express its individuality. This was embedded in the generation before us – our parents’ generation – and then filtered down into how we are and how we behave,” says Salam, who is the daughter of Assem Salam, the renowned Lebanese modernist architect.
“After independence, in the 1950s, all the architects that were training or studying abroad came back to Lebanon to establish their offices here and started creating a vernacular language for the city. They produced some superb designs that gave a real character to the city and produced a very stylish environment that people were very interested in coming to see. So Beirut was really put on the map, becoming ‘the Paris of the Middle East’.”
Of course, the Civil War of the 1980s interrupted this particular trajectory, which has peaked again in the 2000s, creating what Salam refers to as “a yo-yo effect” on the development of Beirut’s design legacy. But the instability did not, by any means, put an end to the city’s creative output. In fact, it propagated its own specific aesthetic. “The Civil War created a missing link. It interrupted a lot of development in the city, where a lot of us left for abroad. But for me, during the Civil War, while many things halted, at the same time many other areas, such as graphics, continued to develop because of the visual communications of all the militia parties and how they expressed themselves through posters. That was the beginning of graphic design in the city, done by amateurs or non-trained designers who littered the whole city with very unusual, very local graphics.”
Does instability breed creativity, I wonder? “Yes, absolutely. That’s what makes us completely crazy. The instability is what keeps us going. It’s in our DNA now,” Salam says with a hearty laugh.
This is not, Salam points out, an exhibition about Lebanon – it is very specifically about Beirut. It will cover architecture, interiors, products and graphics, featuring the work of some 160 creatives and showcasing everything from a well-designed falafel shop and interesting retail spaces to iconic buildings and pieces of furniture. In terms of criteria, Salam was looking for good design that presented interesting solutions, but was also unique, of a high quality and had personality. “I didn’t want to put in the obvious and the predictable. Some people you will have seen before, but I tried to include others that nobody has heard of.”
Salam had a very short time frame to work with (she started work on the exhibition at the end of August and, she says, has done a year’s job in two months) but she felt it was her “duty to do this for the city and the people who are representing it”.
The process has proven particularly challenging, but also particularly interesting, because this is, for the most part, completely uncharted territory. “It has been very exciting and a real adventure. It has also highlighted how little has been done and written and collected on this subject. Images from the 1950s, for example, are very hard to find. We looked at the things that we thought make Beirut brilliant and discovered things that we never knew.”
The best of these things were the personalities and stories that Salam came across along the way, as well interesting discoveries about how people archive and preserve information – or don’t. Either way, Salam was the perfect choice for such an undertaking.
Much like those architects in the 1950s, she studied and started her career abroad, opening her first studio in London in 2002, before returning to Lebanon in 2010 and launching the Rana Salam Design store in 2011. Taking her visual cues from billboards, vintage film posters and signs of consumerism, her work is heavily influenced by pop culture in the Middle East, which is translated into visual solutions ranging from book covers and chocolate wrappers to window displays, cafe interiors and a delightful collection of home accessories.
She is part of a new breed of Lebanese creatives who, along with the likes of Nada Debs, Karen Chekerdjian and Huda Baroudi and Maria Hibri of Bokja, have helped spread word of Beirut’s stellar design capabilities to the wider world. One only need look at the products that Salam creates for her online store, www.mishmaoul.com, to see the nostalgia, the respect for tradition and craftsmanship and, perhaps most importantly, the humour that underpins much of the design coming out of the city.
This humour is reflected in the graphics that Salam has painstakingly crafted for the Brilliant Beirut exhibition. "It is not this high-end, intellectual presentation of the story. It's loud and fresh and dynamic and very billboard-style. It's not at all British Museum or academic. Of course there's an underlying sense of academia there, but that's not how we've presented it, at all."
The overarching message is how ingrained creativity, in all its various forms, is in the city’s fabric, and how Beirut has managed to remain, almost unwittingly, at the forefront of the region’s design industry. “Beirut, as this exhibition tries to explain, has become a leading city in terms of design in the region. We have kind of become the little star of the region. What makes us different is we are very cosmopolitan; it is a small city, but there’s an eclectic mix that makes us different. It is not a city that is perfect but its imperfections are what make it beautiful and allow us to create all these unexpected products, ideas, interiors and architecture.”
Ultimately, for Salam, design can play a fundamental role in challenging preconceived notions about Beirut and the wider Middle East. “The media has really tainted the image of Beirut but design has put it back on the map at an international level. It’s not the politics that has done that. Design is a responsibility. Its not just something that looks beautiful. It’s how you create a culture for a city; it is a very important medium to express and represent a culture.”
sdenman@thenationl.ae
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