Hosted by the Ruin: Life of Abandoned Modernism
Carol El Farraji
We are Carol El Farraji and Karla Abou Khalil, two Lebanese architects, researchers and contemporary heritage practitioners working across architecture, urbanism, adaptive reuse, documentation and visual inquiry. Our work explores places in transition, combining architectural research, photography and field observation to investigate how ecological, cultural and social processes continue to shape the built environment.
Our practice has been shaped by academic, professional and cultural experiences across Lebanon, Spain, Italy, Lithuania, Saudi Arabia and the United States. We first met during our Bachelor of Architecture before reuniting through the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master in Architecture and Urban Contemporary Heritage (ARURCOHE), completed across San Sebastián, Turin and Kaunas, where our shared interest in twentieth century heritage developed into a lasting collaboration.
While our research follows different trajectories, it converges around a common ambition to rethink how contemporary heritage is understood and engaged with. Carol's research examines how heritage shaped by disruption can be reinterpreted through design, documentation and collective narratives. Karla's work reinterprets Beirut's post war modern heritage as sites of conscience, exploring how architecture can foster collective reflection and public engagement. Together, we bridge architectural practice, heritage research and visual inquiry to develop collaborative, site responsive approaches to the built environment.
Our paths crossed years ago, but Crossroads emerged through our shared commitment to contemporary heritage. More than a name, it reflects how we practice: at the intersection of architecture, research, visual inquiry and storytelling, uncovering the layered relationships between people, places and landscapes in transition.
What happens to architecture once human care recedes?
This question emerged through our research on twentieth-century heritage around Europe and Lebanon, where we have explored modern buildings caught between dissonance, abandonment, preservation and redevelopment. Rather than becoming empty, these places continue to evolve: materials weather, spontaneous vegetation reshapes architecture, and surrounding communities maintain layered and often conflicting relationships with them. We see these sites not as forgotten relics, but as living landscapes where ecological and cultural processes continue to unfold.
Hosted by the Ruin is a transferable collaborative protocol that creates temporary spaces for collective interpretation before irreversible decisions about a site's future are made. Each edition gathers artists, architects, landscape architects, designers, conservation practitioners, ecologists, historians, researchers and local communities around a single twentieth-century ruin. Through observation, dialogue, mapping, artistic production and public engagement, participants develop multiple readings of the site, revealing values that no single discipline could identify alone.
Rather than treating ecological succession as evidence of decline, the protocol considers spontaneous vegetation and environmental transformation as integral to the identity of the modern ruin. These changing relationships between architecture, nature and people become the basis for new conversations around heritage, care and the future of the built environment.
The protocol can unfold through workshops, exhibitions, lectures, collaborative residencies, publications or public forums, adapting to each site's context and collaborators. Instead of prescribing what a modern ruin should become, Hosted by the Ruin expands who participates in imagining its future, fostering environmental awareness, collective stewardship and more inclusive approaches to twentieth-century heritage.
