Burj al Naqoura is a medieval watchtower located on the coast of Ras al Naqoura, South of Lebanon. It is today in a public cemetery, within the protected area of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). The tower is part of a network of coastal watchtowers all along the Mediterranean littoral. Nowadays, only 9 watchtowers still partially remain on the Lebanese shores.
The UNIFIL’s G9 CIMIC tactical team launched the project of assessing and restoring the tower, now in a dangerous abandoned state. We were assigned the historical and architectural study of the Burj, as well as its restoration and adaptive reuse design. The project, with its many social, religious, and tactical constraints, presented a challenging and inspiring venture. Through our design, we aimed at resolving structural and architectural problems, at providing urgent and long-term solutions, and at creating an architectural language that extracts from the existing structure hosting it, and gives it a concrete and harmonized meaning. The tower’s new proposal and adaptive reuse was developed as a reconciliation between the past and the future, between the social and the cultural.
