THE DREAM FACTORY

‘The Dream Factory’ — مصنع الأحلام — is a design fiction developed in June 2022 as part of the ‘Thinking-through-Making’ course led by Professor Michelle Gay at OCAD.

The project revisits the Holiday Inn hotel building in downtown Beirut, which witnessed intense battles during the civil war. Situated at a strategic junction between East and West Beirut, its 26 stories provided high ground with panoptic views, from which snipers controlled the main axes on both sides of the city. Today, the Holiday Inn still stands above Beirut, as a skeletal panopticon that haunts the city and reminds its inhabitants of the pervasive nature of the conflict in which they are immersed.

Against this backdrop, which shaped the collective imaginary of Beirut's inhabitants, the project explores a gigantic a storytelling machine — The Dream Factory — located on the 27th floor of the hotel. The machine feeds on the fears of the city’s inhabitants, which infiltrate the building through the shrapnel and bullet impacts. Once inside, the fears travel through a complex network of pipes and tubes, where they are transformed into narratives that dehumanize and stereotype the ‘other’.

This speculative approach to one of the landmarks of the civil war was designed to challenge established perceptions and illustrate how reality is constructed across various modes of representation. The project resulted in the construction of an architectural model of the Holiday Inn, blending elements of reality and fiction, along with a pseudo-documentary titled ‘The 27th Floor,’ and a fictional newspaper called ‘The Other Times: Stories from an Endless Holiday’.