Beirut Reconstruction

On August 4, 2020, 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate detonated at the Port of Beirut. In seconds, the blast killed more than 200 people, displaced 300,000 residents, and tore through one of the Arab world’s most historically layered urban fabrics. The question that followed was not simply how to rebuild, but whether the port should ever again occupy the same waterfront ground.

Beirut carries more than 5,000 years of continuous habitation along the Lebanese Mediterranean coast, where Phoenician, Roman, Ottoman, and French Mandate histories remain legible in its urban grain. Its port functioned as both engine and threat — an economic heart pressed dangerously into a dense historic city. The explosion exposed not only a failure of storage regulation, but a prolonged collapse of governance, with hazardous material known to authorities and left unresolved. INJ Architects responded to the competition by reframing the brief itself: perhaps the first architectural act was not rebuilding the port in place, but questioning that premise.

Location          Beirut Port, Lebanon
Client            Architecture Competition — Reconstructing Beirut
Type              Urban Reconstruction — Competition Entry
Status            Competition Proposal
Year              2021
Principal         Ibrahim Nawaf Joharji
Scope             Urban Planning, Memorial Architecture, Economic Restructuring

The proposal emerged after participation in the Architectural Association School of Architecture symposium “Reconstructing Beirut,” where architects, academics, and community organizers examined the causes of the blast and the city’s path forward. Research began with geolocated footage and three-dimensional modeling, reconstructing the sequence of August 4 with forensic precision. That evidence revealed the spatial and regulatory conditions that allowed the catastrophe to amplify across the port. The project did not begin with an image of a future skyline; it began with a measured reading of failure.

At the urban scale, the proposal relocates the port’s operational functions to a new logistics center outside the city center, releasing the damaged waterfront for a mixed-use district of far greater civic and economic value. The former port land, among the most valuable parcels on the Lebanese Mediterranean coast, had long been burdened by an industrial program fundamentally misaligned with its setting. Here, the explosion is understood not only as tragedy, but as the violent exposure of a century-old planning error. The design answers that revelation by returning the waterfront to the city.

At the center of the project is a stacked ring structural system, a typology in which complete annular floor plates are layered vertically with geometric and programmatic offsets. It rejects the conventional tower-and-podium model; each ring is an inhabited plane, open at its center to sky, air, and filtered daylight. From the exterior, the building reads as a sequence of hovering horizontal bands rather than a single vertical extrusion. Conceived specifically for Beirut as a registered design concept, the system allows every level to hold a distinct program and a different spatial relationship to the Mediterranean light above.

Lebanon exists within a wider regional climate of political corruption, and the Beirut explosion exposed a point of collapse where politics, citizenship, and architecture failed together. We entered this competition as a Saudi office because Lebanon is geographically and culturally close to us, and its reconstruction demands both architectural expertise and insightful urban planning. Any serious proposal must also confront the economic dimension, because recovery cannot endure without a viable financial structure.

The stacked ring system operates as an urban-scale structural sponge, developed in direct response to Beirut’s vulnerability. Where rigid dense blocks tend to concentrate blast forces at orthogonal joints, the annular geometry disperses lateral pressure along curvature, while open central voids allow shock waves to vent vertically through the section. The offset stacking breaks continuous load paths, reducing the risk of progressive collapse if one ring is compromised. This logic is not an afterthought to form; it is the generative principle from which the form emerges.

The masterplan is organized into three zones, each calibrated to program and memory. Zone One, closest to the existing city fabric, carries residential and commercial development — the economic engine that reactivates the waterfront as part of Beirut’s everyday life. Zone Two combines the port’s remaining operational functions with a memorial landscape, centered on a prayer circle placed at the blast epicenter and opened toward uninterrupted Mediterranean views. Zone Three contains the Tower of Resurrection, whose base accommodates administrative and cultural functions before rising through mixed-use rings to a panoramic platform suspended between city and sea.

Zone One is structured by the One-Minute City model, first developed in Sweden, in which residents can reach essential daily services within a one-minute walk or cycling distance from home. In Beirut, that principle distributes services across the district instead of concentrating them in isolated commercial nodes. The strategy becomes more than convenience: it is an urban safeguard against the kind of centralized failure that allowed danger to accumulate unchecked at the port. Here, decentralization is translated into form, access, and political meaning.

The stacked ring building system developed for this proposal is a registered design concept under INJ Architects — a structural and programmatic typology designed for urban conditions that demand resilience, flexibility, and civic legibility at the waterfront scale. In Beirut, it is deployed as a reconstruction instrument, where structural performance and public symbolism operate together. The urban research and planning methodology informing this proposal is detailed in how-we-work. The environmental performance framework underlying the sponge city logic is outlined under sustainability. For government bodies and development agencies managing reconstruction or large-scale waterfront transformation, the engagement framework is available through bespoke-architecture.

Aerial perspective of the reclaimed Beirut waterfront and stacked ring complex
Bird’s-eye view of the reclaimed port edge, where the stacked ring complex steps along the Mediterranean and returns industrial ground to the city. Image © INJ Architects
Wide coastal panorama of the three-zone Beirut masterplan
Wide coastal panorama showing the three-zone masterplan stretched across the former port, from the urban edge to the memorial shoreline. Image © INJ Architects
Elevation study of the stacked ring building system
Elevation study of the stacked ring typology, with each annular plate shifted from the next to avoid the profile of a conventional tower. Image © INJ Architects
Sea-facing perspective of the stacked rings against Beirut skyline
Sea-facing perspective of the stacked rings, their horizontal bands reading as layered civic terraces against Beirut’s skyline. Image © INJ Architects
Section through annular floors with open cores for light and air
Sectional view through the annular floors, where open cores draw light and air deep into the vertical stack. Image © INJ Architects
Competition diagram mapping blast radius across the port infrastructure
Competition diagram mapping the blast zone against the port’s existing infrastructure, establishing the ground conditions of the proposal. Image © INJ Architects
Plan of the memorial precinct with prayer circle at the blast epicenter
Plan of the memorial precinct, with the prayer circle set precisely at the epicenter and the landscape opening toward the sea. Image © INJ Architects
Vertical section of the Tower of Resurrection from base to viewing crown
Vertical section of the Tower of Resurrection, from its administrative base to the panoramic crown overlooking city and water. Image © INJ Architects
Service distribution diagram for Zone One under the One-Minute City model
Service-distribution diagram for Zone One, showing daily amenities dispersed at walkable intervals across the new district. Image © INJ Architects
Full-site rendering from the Mediterranean showing the three-part reconstruction
Full-site rendering from the Mediterranean, where housing, memorial ground, and civic tower organize the liberated port land. Image © INJ Architects
Ground-level view beneath the stacked ring structure and public space
Ground-level view beneath the ring structure, where cantilevered floor plates create shaded public space at the street edge. Image © INJ Architects
Waterfront perspective with the coastline reopened to public access
Waterfront perspective showing the coastline reopened to public use, replacing the former industrial barrier with a civic promenade. Image © INJ Architects
Diagram relocating port operations beyond the Beirut urban core
Relocation diagram shifting port operations beyond the urban core and freeing the blast site for mixed-use redevelopment. Image © INJ Architects
Night rendering of the illuminated stacked rings above the memorial shoreline
Night rendering of the proposal, with the illuminated rings rising above the memorial shoreline as a new beacon on Beirut’s coast. Image © INJ Architects
Economic mapping of land value across the former port
Economic mapping of the former port, comparing land value and redevelopment potential against the cost of retaining industrial use on the waterfront. Image © INJ Architects
Forensic reconstruction of the Beirut blast using geolocated footage
Forensic analysis reconstructing the explosion through geolocated footage and port geometry to identify the spatial causes of failure. Image © INJ Architects
Comparative structural diagram of the ring system and a rigid block
Comparative structural diagram showing how the annular ring system disperses lateral force more softly than a rigid orthogonal block. Image © INJ Architects
Program diagram of the memorial zone with prayer space and viewing platforms
Program diagram of the memorial zone, aligning prayer space, sea-facing platforms, and buffers around the blast epicenter. Image © INJ Architects
Residential planning diagram for Zone One on the reclaimed port edge
Residential planning diagram for Zone One, where the One-Minute City model distributes homes and services along the reclaimed edge. Image © INJ Architects
Masterplan of the three-zone reconstruction strategy across the former port
Masterplan of the three-zone strategy, linking urban development, memorial ground, and tower infrastructure across the former port. Image © INJ Architects
City-side view of the Tower of Resurrection rising from the memorial landscape
City-side view of the Tower of Resurrection, its stacked rings rising from the memorial landscape at the site of the explosion. Image © INJ Architects
Final aerial perspective of the reconstructed Beirut waterfront
Final aerial perspective of the new waterfront, where reconstruction is framed not as erasure but as a spatial response to memory and risk. Image © INJ Architects