Architecture in Lebanon: The Lebanese House During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Foreword. This book is about traditional architecture in Lebanon. The heart of Lebanon is in the mountains which rise between the Mediterranean Sea and the sun-drenched plains of Syria, a beautiful land of deep valleys and lofty summits which constitutes a manifold exception in the Arab Near East. For this reason a distinctive architecture developed here as the fruit of interaction between general Near Eastern concepts and the specific character of Lebanon. The Lebanese expression is strongest on the vernacular level where people respond directly to a different environment.
This is a study, then, of the Lebanese dwelling house as it exists in its simplest form as a shepherd's shelter, the slightly more sophisticated peasant's home, village houses, isolated residences and the elatively luxurious dwellings of the upper classes. Palaces have been excluded, however, as they
constitute a special study in themselves, and to have considered them here would have meant obscuring my central concern, which is to describe the development of Lebanese domestic architecture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.