Glass and Glare: Reflections on Balcony Glazing in Beirut
As light travels through the atmosphere, it collides with the occasional surface and scatters. In cities like Beirut, that surface is likely to be a glazed panel of some sort. While most light, whether emitted by the sun or projected from a lamp, manages to pass through the glass in question, a sizable portion will be reflected upon impact. Although standard glass is translucent in principle, it often assumes the properties of a mirror. In it, the conditions of the city are reflected and refracted across Beirut, ad infinitum.
Once confined to the space of the window or sliding door, these urban echoes now sprawl across the glazed expanses of the city’s many balconies. The panels of curtain glass that run their perimeters ricochet instances of street life skyward and replicate the mess of frayed wiring and faulty infrastructure suspended in the air between them. And though they double and triple the affairs organized across Beirut’s many apartments and alleyways, these palimpsests of mirror images go largely unnoticed by the people that populate them.
The existence of these reflections at the edge of our perception helped qualify the practice of balcony glazing for legalization in 2004. While balconies are typically classified as outdoor spaces, the amendment introduced to Beirut’s 1983 Construction Law stipulates the right to their enclosure should the material used to do so be of a transparent nature. More specifically, enclosing materials must be adjustable and affixed to tracks—akin to the traditional curtains they have largely since supplanted[1]. The amendment was promptly adapted into both new and old construction schemes across the city. It added sorely needed living space to older apartments and maximized allowable footprints—and thus profits—for contractors building anew. Any ragged fabric seen whipping in the wind today is arguably more indicative of class difference than it is of preference. To register which of these spaces still maintain a relationship with the elements—with the sun, the wind, and the stars—is also, in many ways, to trace financial insecurity apartment by apartment, neighborhood by neighborhood, across the city.
Due to the severity of the infrastructural collapse in Beirut, balcony glazing affords an illusory measure of safety and control to those attempting to brave these conditions. It staves off what it can of waste-crisis born pollutants while keeping at bay the thick haze of smog that now perpetually blankets the city. With dwellers turning collectively in and away from the noxious effects of state sanctioned corruption, balcony glazing is now an impulsive, standard practice for those who can afford it. Each panel installed envelops the transitional area that is the balcony and firmly distinguishes the space of the city from that of the dwelling. And that is not without consequence.
Embraced though it is as non-material, balcony glazing has tangibly transformed the very fabric of Beirut just as it has altered our own relationships to it. Terraces once open to sea, sky, street, and neighbor are instead sealed off with panes endemic to the very crises they are meant to moderate. The same debilitating cycles of extraction and consumption razing the country are only further fortified here to provide the resources necessary for the accommodation of this practice. The sheer quantity of extraneous material balcony glazing has introduced into the cityscape since 2004 has made glass one of the country’s leading imports,[2] and balcony glazing one of its most lucrative, privately funded sources of infrastructural support. It is also one of the deadliest.
Invisible and yet ever-present, glass introduced by way of balcony glazing would continue to accumulate across Beirut only to shatter in the port explosion of August 4, 2020. The resultant shards claimed the lives of over 200 people and maimed thousands more. Equating glass’ transparency with immateriality proved lethal. With the reasons for its initial installation—like pollution and poor air quality—only further exacerbated by the blast, much of these panels have since been restored or replaced. These cycles of repair and ruin position balcony glazing as both a product and purveyor of Beirut’s relentless collapse.[3] This practice makes legible the consequences of social, economic, and political turmoil as embodied by the built environment, and it contributes to the compounding of these crises through the consumption of material it warrants. Every sheet of curtain glass installed is material mined, extracted, and imported.
Even though the requisite resources are fired and finished to near invisibility, the consequences of their making are plainly reflected across the city in a perpetual collision of light and political crisis made manifest. Rarely is this urban spectacle cause for conversation, but that is not to say that its sensorial implications on our shared experience of the city are not deeply felt and sorely recognized. Regardless of how accustomed we are to all manner of calamity in Beirut, each intervention on the built environment unsettles and recalibrates our relationship to it. Balcony glazing, while inconspicuous and understated, is symptomatic of a shared incapacity to withstand the adaptation demanded of us by the failed infrastructures and services that litter the city. For amongst the panes that mirror reality back to us, the occasional burst of glare will inevitably overwhelm the senses, and our eyes, minds, and bodies will simply refuse to adjust.
Artist’s Statement
Like everything else in Beirut, the arts have been severely impacted by the State's collapse. Film is scarce and when one can find it, it is often unaffordable. Developing photography presents its own set of issues too and inconsistencies arise because of it. Shot on Kodak 400 and Kodak Portra 400 35mm film, these images deliberately reflect the collapse in both process and outcome.
Notes
[1] Lebanon, Parliament, Amending Legislative Decree No. 148 of 9/16/1983 (Building Law), Law No. 646, December 11, 2004, Article 14, Section 2, Item No. 1.
[2] “Lebanon Product Imports.” Lebanon Product Imports 2020 | WITS Data. https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/LBN/Year/2020/TradeFlow/Import/Partner/WLD/Product/all-groups.
[3] Batoul Faour, “Glass Politics: On Broken Windows in Beirut,” The Avery Review, Issue 52 (April 2021): https://averyreview.com/issues/52/glass-politics.
Bio
Aya Nadera Zantout is an architect and multidisciplinary artist based in Beirut. Since graduating with a BArch from The American University of Beirut in 2020, she has dedicated much of her creative and professional work to navigating the many intersections of art and the built environment. She often finds herself documenting her city’s conflicting identities as they continue to evolve throughout various crises. Most recently, she has been developing her printmaking practice at Beirut Printmaking Studio, and has participated in collective printmaking shows in Beirut, Liverpool, and Paris.
Meriam Soltan is a writer and researcher interested in the intersections of language, design, and worldbuilding. An assistant editor at Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, she works to explore the design of fictions and how they are manifested in various contexts politically, culturally, and otherwise. Meriam received her Master of Science in Architecture Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2022 and her Bachelor of Architecture from The American University of Beirut in 2019. She is a recipient of the MIT Architecture Thesis Award and the Berkeley Essay Prize, and her writing has been featured in Postmedieval, The Funambulist, Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal, MIT’s Thresholds, and ETH Zurich’s Trans Magazin.
A Visual Essay by Marwa Shykhon