Join us for another seminar in our series co-supported by the Institute of Historical Research and organised in collaboration with the Oxford Architectural History Seminar. For more information on the series click here. Yasmina El Chami presents her research on nineteenth century Beirut and missionary building.
When the first building of the Syrian Protestant College (SPC, now AUB) founded by American missionaries of the ABCFM was completed in 1873, the hill of Ras Beirut was an empty expanse of sand dunes and cactus lanes, and Beirut, a small town that was just witnessing renewed growth. Closely predating the city’s late-nineteenth century urbanisation, American missionaries were able to acquire extensive lands in the western outskirts of the city, and to establish the distinct and impressive campus of the SPC. This talk focuses on the construction of the SPC between 1866 and 1900, and examines the close relationship between the missionaries’ increasingly political ambitions and their architectural and urban project. The paper argues that the built environment of the College was carefully conceived as a tool with which to attract, expand, and represent power over the city and its population. El Chami traces the complex diplomatic, industrial, philanthropic, commercial, and local networks of power harnessed by the missionaries to negotiate their position and ensure the survival of their project within the contested and overlapping ‘fields’ of Beirut, the Ottoman Empire, France, England, and North America. Thus, the project of the Protestant missionaries in Beirut is analysed as a project of negotiated power. Within this project, architecture did not operate as simple projection of an ‘American’ or Evangelical culture, nor of direct colonial power and control; rather, architecture evolved from an initially haphazard embodiment of the various local and global demands negotiating its production to an increasingly deliberate representation of an ‘American’ campus, once the missionaries became well-established.
Yasmina El Chami is an architect, Cambridge Trust Scholar, and third-year PhD Candidate in the Centre for Urban Conflicts Research (UCR) at the Department of Architecture. Her doctoral research looks at the spread of missionary educational institutions in nineteenth-century Lebanon, and their role in the urbanisation of Beirut. She holds a BArch from the American University of Beirut, and an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design from the Architectural Association in London. This autumn she will take up a Scouloudi-Doctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research, London.
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