A house that was made once in 1912 and had to be made again in our lifetime.
Nicolas Ibrahim Sursock built his villa on the Achrafieh hill in 1912 and left it, at his death in 1952, to the city of Beirut. It opened as a museum in 1961. What I have read of the building says two things at once — a Venetian-Italianate front, all arcaded windows and pale worked stone, and Ottoman craftsmanship inside it — and I confess I distrust descriptions of hybrid architecture until I have stood in front of them, because the word usually means the two halves are arguing. Every account I can find insists that here they do not.
Then there is the modern half of the problem. A renovation completed in 2015 dug four floors into the hill beneath the villa and took the museum from roughly fifteen hundred square metres to eight and a half thousand, which is a fivefold expansion accomplished, in effect, downward and out of sight. I want to know what that costs a house. A domestic villa asked to carry a contemporary exhibition programme usually ends up as a lobby with rooms attached; the trick of putting the new work under the ground is meant to spare it that. Whether it does is the sort of thing you can only settle by walking from the Salon Arabe to a white gallery and noticing how hard the transition lands.
And then, of course, the fourth of August 2020. The port blast took the stained glass off the facade, blew the doors through the rooms and damaged something close to half of what was on display. The museum was shut for nearly three years and reopened on the twenty-sixth of May 2023. I have put April aside for it — long light, before the heat — and I intend to arrive at ten, when the doors open, and give the building an hour before I let myself look at a single painting. That is not reverence. It is simply that the building is the thing that was lost and the thing that was rebuilt, and I would rather meet it before I am distracted.
The plates are held empty on purpose. I do not publish photographs of rooms I have not stood in, and I have not stood in these. When I have, they will be filled and dated.
They rebuilt the windows from photographs of a man who had been dead for seventy years.
On 4 August 2020 the ammonium nitrate stored at the port went up, and the stained glass that had glazed this facade since 1912 came down. Doors were driven through rooms. Something near half the work then on display was damaged. The museum, less than a kilometre from the blast, was one of hundreds of buildings on that hillside that lost their faces in the same second.
What happened next is why the entry is here at all. The glass was remade by Maya Hussein, working from archival photographs taken when Nicolas Sursock still lived in the house, using hand-blown sheets given by what is described as the last traditional atelier of its kind in France. The Salon Arabe went to Camille Tarazi and the Maison Tarazi workshop, who have been doing this sort of woodwork in Beirut for generations. The Italian government put in a million euros. The doors opened again on 26 May 2023.
I have not seen any of it, and I am wary of writing about a catastrophe I watched on a screen from a very comfortable chair. So I will say only the part I am entitled to: a city with every reason to give up on a villa did not, and the repair was done by named hands to a photographic record rather than to somebody's taste. That is preservation at its least sentimental and its most stubborn, and I would like to stand under those windows and see whether the seams show. I rather hope they do.