114. Nightrise and the Nocturnal Landscape with Mohamad Nahleh
Original Drawing by Tori Haynes
“What I tried to do first with the title was to destabilize the semantic bias against the night...I was trying to start the conversation by saying that there’s a bias that’s deeply rooted in our language that favors the night or illustrates the night as a negative term…So Nightrise is a term I coined to focus on the social and cultural construction of the night by people mostly interacting with or living in or benefitting from the nocturnal landscape...”
Mohamad Nahleh
What is an architecture of the Nightrise? How might we spatialize the unseeable, or “freeze” the shadows of a conjuration? This week, we have a fascinating discussion with Mohamad Nahleh, a recent MIT graduate, about his recent personal research and graduate thesis of the night in Jabal ‘Amil in the southern reaches of Lebanon.
Timestamp Outline
2:30 Mohamad Nahleh’s recently completed thesis: NIGHTRISE Through the Valley of Jabal ‘Amil’s Shadow
3:20 What is Nightrise about?
4:00 “What I tried to do first with the title was to destabilize the semantic bias against the night...I was trying to start the conversation by saying that there’s a bias that’s deeply rooted in our language that favors the night or illustrates the night as a negative term…So Nightrise is a term I coined to focus on the social and cultural construction of the night by people mostly interacting with or living in or benefitting from the nocturnal landscape...” MN
5:30 “...Because of the very Eurocentric attitudes that frame the night as a negation of the day...the day is a place, but the night is a time...I always struggled with this conception…” MN
8:50 “...When we talk about discrimination, we only talk about discrimination spatially, we say this place and this place...we don’t really talk about it during the day...what has been part of the research I’ve been doing is how the audiences of the day versus the night completely shift and the way we design is actually rejecting this change…” MN
9:30 Overilluminated cities, light colonizes and gentrifies the night
11:00 Beirut explosion on August 4, 2020 and the beginning of Mohamad’s night journey through Lebanon.
19:20 “...What are the forms of the night? What kind of space or architecture can exist if you use the night as a place and not just time…who visits the space?”
21:48 “That was a main concern for me is what happens when we start to obsess less about this seemingly instinctive relationship between eyesight and insight and realize that perhaps they are not as connected as the Eurocentric model has convinced us…” MN
23:30 discussion of decolonizing the senses
25:26 Israeli Occupation of southern Lebanon
27:20 discussion of nocturnal stories in the Oral culture of Southern Lebanon
28:00 discussion of the Mohamad’s design process
34:50 critique of the word “site”
26:20 Jorge Luis Borges, author
40:09 Nirvana, to blow out the light
41:19 Proverb: “look under any stone in Jabal ‘Amil and you will find a poet.”
