Beirut: The World's Most Fascinating Urban Experiment

But if this city's surviving inhabitants have yet to fully recover from the psychic damage the war caused, the rapid pace of its physical reconstruction has since transformed it into one of the world's most fascinating urban experiments... A long list of architectural luminaries ... have recently been given major commissions here... The importance of these moves extends far beyond issues of urban planning. They are the basis of a vision rarely seen today: a city of often contradictory values that nonetheless retains a sense of cultural wholeness."