Thanks to Bryan Finoki, I’ve discovered
Bullet Lights
, a proposal by Edwin Gardner.
Throughout Beirut, we read, there are uncountable thousands of bullet holes, small punctures in the walls of the city; these are architectural signs of “past violence, conflict and war.”
The idea behind Bullet Lights, then, is to reverse “the meaning and experience” of the city’s wounded walls by flooding them with light from within: the shells of old buildings, damaged by war, become chandeliers – Gardner’s “unexpected poetic moments of beauty.”
It is through damage that the buildings can shine.
There’s an old Coil song, called Titan Arch, that includes the line: “His wounds are shining” – which would be completely irrelevant to this post were it not for the fact that: 1) I’ve sometimes imagined scars – the healed remnants of wounding – as a kind of earthly astronomy, injurious constellations burning new white windows through the skin; and 2) that’s exactly what Gardner’s buildings would do for Beirut: they’re scarred, showing that the wounded have a brighter light within.

(Other trips through Beirut on BLDGBLOG:
Future Beirut
and
beirut.bldg
).