Min Bʻīd la-Bʻīd (from Far to Far): On Homemaking under Diasporic Conditions

Abstract

In the villages of Mount-Lebanon, homes are realized through years of immigrants’ exchanged remittances, messages, objects, and visits. This thesis offers an expanded understanding of the homes and homemaking of diasporic families, through which they manage separation and fragmentation and adapt to personal and regional political change.

To reveal how diasporic subjects build and make their homes while and from abroad or back and forth between locales, I extract from my conversations with owners of remittance-funded houses in ’Aley and Shūf. In reconstructed videos of the in-progress homes, first-hand accounts, concurrent global events, and the material traces of migration are juxtaposed, making the relationships between distance, its mediations, and the built form apparent.

As a result, several signature architectural concepts are re-imagined. In the first chapter, “site” is no longer understood to simply be location, where the building is bound by coordinates or where owners have to be physically present; site, as captured through WhatsApp images, is dispersed, thus becoming the captured change that occurs throughout the conception and construction of their homes. Each following chapter similarly re-imagines and expands our use of architectural concepts such as “budget,” “program,” “phases,” “finishes,” “furniture, fixtures,” and “contracts” to suggest how we may appropriate this new understanding as a design tool.

Ultimately, this thesis establishes the human experience of immigrant-builders as not ancillary but central to the discipline of architecture.