The competition's Site is a major site designated for the railways. It is located next to the Beirut River at these coordinates: 33.877987 lat. 35.526924 lon.
The images show the surrounding of the site where one part has these relatively recent and high end (tall) buildings (upper East). On the upper west, besides one signature architecture building nearby, the adjacent lots are mainly empty. On the lowest west is the old urban fabric relatively low rise, and small. in the Low East is a large temporary exhibition space, and on the south agricultural fields.
The site in itself has some official governmental and security agencies, and a lot of train carcasses. For the purpose of this competition we will disregard all existing structure on Site. The topographic levels will be shown on the CAD file that will be shared with the participants. The site levels varies between 10m and 30m.
Nearby to the north is the elevated hill of Achrafiyeh, one of Beirut mixed used zone yet with more residential than commercial