Holiday Inn Beirut
André Wogenscky + Maurice Hindié · Beirut, Lebanon · 1974
The former Holiday Inn is a concrete high-rise whose ruined state has become inseparable from Beirut’s urban memory. Opened in 1974, the hotel was soon turned into a strategic strongpoint during the Lebanese Civil War because of its height and location. The tower’s repetitive room grid and projecting slabs remain visible beneath extensive shell and bullet damage, leaving the structure as an unintentional monument to the conflict. It has never returned to hotel use. Architecturally, the building is significant both as late-modern hospitality infrastructure and as a rare preserved urban war ruin at metropolitan scale.