Exhibition shows what America looks like from Beirut

Vulture

Beirut is a 5,000-year-old city, or series of cities, each layered over another on the same site, living with the previous era’s ghosts. Today, it can feel like a place steadily, and in certain ways, heedlessly devouring itself to meet the various needs of an uneasy and unevenly affluent now, the ancient souks rebuilt as a series of covered outdoor shopping malls — Zaha Hadid designed one — and Miami-style starchitect-luxe condo towers (by the likes of Herzog & de Meuron and Norman Foster) coexisting side by side with pocked concrete high-rise ruins, legacies of when the city was divided between Christian and Muslim sections during the 1975–1990 civil war, and snipers would nest in the upper floors, keeping watch on the borderline between them.

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