Saida Waterfront

Saida, Lebanon

This project responds to Saida’s fractured relationship with its shoreline, where infrastructural barriers, incremental development, and loss of spatial clarity have weakened the seafront’s role as a civic and social interface.

The proposal frames the waterfront as a legible urban threshold—a space of transition rather than a residual edge—re-establishing the seafront as a shared point of orientation, gathering, and belonging.

Through site readings across macro and micro scales—urban density, building height, movement patterns, and spatial rhythm—the intervention translates contextual data into an abstract field of geometric structures. These elements operate simultaneously as landmark markers and human-scale devices, structuring movement, pause, and occupation along the shoreline.

Rather than functioning as isolated objects, the structures act as spatial instruments: filtering views, framing proximity to the sea, and organising a sequence of shaded, porous environments that encourage engagement without enclosing the waterfront.

Conceived as a civic catalyst, the project establishes an active public ground and a clear physical entrance to the city. Its ambition is not to monumentalise the seafront, but to restore continuity—reconnecting communities across Saida’s historic edge and reasserting the relationship between city, people, and water.