Christelle Farhat's project on the intersection between Lebanon's memory and Belgium's heritage

She chose to bring new life to an old abandoned castle, the Château de Grimbergen, for her MA project in architecture at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium. At the same time, she developed a new, original concept entitled, "Box in the Box," which impressed the jury for its originality and earned her high praise. But when asked: Why ruins and why Belgium?, she said, "It was the destruction of my grandparents' house during the war in 2006 that was the driving force behind my entire decision."

At the time, she was only six years old. But this loss marked her deeply and years later led her to reflect on the possibility of "reviving a ruin by bringing damaged spaces back to life without erasing or freezing them." "I have always been interested in seeing how sites often marked by conflict and abandonment can be transformed into living places, how to adapt them to the needs of the local community while preserving their identity and memory, and, above all, how history and collective memories can coexist in a location and keep telling a new story," the young student explains.

In 2023, as she began her Master 1 project at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA), where she was studying architecture. Farhat chose to bring back to life a site in Lebanon: A theater in Kfarshima, the village where she lived, dating back to the 1800s. "After an exchange semester at UCLouvain, I was forced to stay there, as the situation in the country had become too risky. I then had to change the site for my graduation project." She chose a site in Belgium, similar to the one in Lebanon, and decided to focus on the Château de Grimbergen, built in the medieval era and completely devastated by a fire in 1940. The building, which had survived several eras, bore a rich history.

"I realized that it wasn't so much the place itself that interested me, but the method, the one that would respect my main goal: to determine whether it was possible to revive a ruin in Belgium as one would in Lebanon, and especially to bring back to life a forgotten memory while preserving its original essence." She then began her long process of research and questioning with the Grimbergen municipality, planning her project in several phases throughout the year. "The first semester focused on conceptualizing the project, doing research, learning about the castle's history, its original layout, and the reasons it was abandoned. Later, in the second semester, I had to build my project, which took me four long months of work."

With the aim of preserving the castle's history and exterior facade, she decided to use gabion, a more contemporary material. It's a wire mesh container, usually made of welded or woven iron wires and filled with small stones. The gabion maintains the building's shape and creates a visual continuity with the ruin. At the same time, she drew inspiration from the Kintsugi method, a philosophy that highlights an object by filling its cracks with gold. Unlike this method, however, she chose to revalue these fractures, which she describes as "part of the soul of this ruin." She kept the emptiness present in the castle’s gaps and cracks and highlighted them by filling them with metal mesh. But the young student didn't stop there. She created a new concept, "Box in the Box": modular structures similar to containers that can be placed inside a building — in this case, the castle ruins — and can adapt to different functions depending on the needs of the day or the event.

When memory inspires modularity

Once again, it was her memories of life in Lebanon, specifically the alleys of the Mar Mikhael neighborhood — with their bars, galleries, and restaurants constantly opening and closing — that inspired her new concept. "That's where my desire to create multipurpose rooms came from, modular boxes that can change, move, stack, expand and serve various functions: transforming into a library, bar, restaurant, play area, or even an observatory, to meet society’s needs," the young woman explains.

The castle is located in a completely abandoned park. In her project, she places these boxes there, thus offering a second life to this neglected space. "That's what charmed the jury," she confides. While the young student admits that "the quality of her design boards, the choice of materials, and the new box concept" earned her the remarkable grade of 19/20, she emphasizes that it was "her personal story, her way of discussing wars that erase all traces of the country, and her distress at the beautiful homes and sites abandoned in Lebanon, which unfortunately have now become part of the normal landscape," that particularly moved the jury.

"My dream is to one day return to Lebanon to revive these ruins, let them tell a new story, erase the memory of all these wars, and give new hope to the country," she concludes softly.