Architecture, memory, and the places we carry

Architecture is often treated as a record of history. It is the material legacy people leave behind and the landscape through which later generations encounter the past. Less attention, however, is paid to its role in memory, even as the structures outlast the lives lived within them, accumulating personal histories and bearing witness to larger historical change.

That tension between architecture and remembrance lies at the heart of Entre deux rives, voyage en mémoire ("Between Two Shores, A Journey Through Memory"), currently on display at the USEK Museum. Drawing on decades of diplomatic postings that took Maria Magro from Ankara and Jerusalem to Washington and Beirut, the exhibition traces what its accompanying text describes as "an intimate cartography" of the residences and cities she encountered through the career of her husband, French Ambassador Hervé Magro.  

Yet beyond one artist's journey, the exhibition raises a more universal question that sits at the intersection of memory and place: Why does architecture so often become the vessels through which we remember people, countries, and entire chapters of our lives? In Magro’s paintings, architecture is not merely a backdrop to history but one of the ways history is remembered and carried forward.

Architecture as a repository of memory

The idea that architecture functions as a repository of memory is hardly unique to Magro. French philosopher Gaston Bachelard explored this relationship in his 1958 work The Poetics of Space, in which he argued that houses become “containers” of lived experience. Memories, he suggested, are often organized through rooms, staircases, windows, and corners. 

French historian Pierre Nora later advanced a similar idea through his influential concept of lieux de mémoire, or "sites of memory," introduced in the 1980s. Writing at a time when traditional forms of collective memory appeared to be receding, Nora argued that physical locations, monuments, buildings, and landscapes often become repositories of shared remembrance, preserving traces of the past long after the events themselves have passed. 

Magro's exhibition can be read through this lens. Rather than presenting sweeping cityscapes, many of her paintings focus on fragments. An ornate Jerusalem doorway, a stone arcade, a carved fountain, a monastery courtyard, a section of Baalbek's columns. By isolating these details, she directs attention to the elements through which places are often remembered. 

Why Lebanon lends itself to memory

Lebanon offers a particularly compelling setting for such an exploration, as few countries contain as many visible layers of history within such a small geographic space. Roman temples stand alongside Ottoman-era houses, medieval monasteries overlook modern highways, and French Mandate architecture remains woven into the fabric of contemporary cities. 

The exhibition reflects this architectural density. In one watercolor, Magro captures details from the Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek, focusing on carved stone ornamentation that has survived nearly two millennia. Elsewhere, she turns her attention to pointed arches, courtyards, and decorative details characteristic of Lebanon's nineteenth-century architecture.

This layering helps explain why architecture occupies such a prominent place in Lebanese cultural memory. For many communities, buildings carry meanings that extend beyond their physical form, serving as touchstones for family histories, religious traditions, and local identity. In a country where successive civilizations have left visible traces upon the landscape, the built environment frequently becomes a record of those overlapping histories.

Yet for Magro, Lebanon's appeal extends beyond its architectural heritage alone. The country's natural environment proved equally influential. 

"It is only natural that I continued this artistic journey in Lebanon," she told The Beiruter. 

Lebanon will always remain a special country for me because of its natural beauty: the blue of the sea, the greenery of its mountains, and its light.

Those qualities appear throughout the exhibition. Even when architecture serves as the focal point, the surrounding environment remains present through washes of color, shifting light, and carefully observed natural details.

Between France and the Levant

The exhibition's title refers to more than geography. It also speaks to the historical and cultural dialogue embedded within the buildings themselves.

The collection traces a route through cities that have long occupied a crossroads between European and Middle Eastern histories, moving through spaces where architectural traditions, political legacies, and cultural influences have intersected for centuries. Rather than documenting these histories directly, the exhibition approaches them through the buildings that have absorbed and witnessed them.

Few sites better illustrate this intersection than the Résidence des Pins. Built in 1915 by the Beirut businessman Michel Trad, the residence later became the official home of the French High Commissioner during the Mandate period. It was from its grounds on September 1, 1920, that General Henri Gouraud proclaimed the creation of Greater Lebanon, rendering the building one of the most historically significant sites in the country's modern history.

As a result, the residence occupies a distinctive position within both Lebanese and French historical memory. It is simultaneously a family residence, a diplomatic institution, an architectural landmark, and a site associated with the emergence of the modern Lebanese state.

Yet the significance of the residence lies not only in the history attached to it, but also in its continued role as a lived space. During her husband's tenure as French ambassador, the building became part of Magro's daily surroundings and artistic landscape. Magro described the Résidence des Pins as both beautiful and historically significant, noting that it holds "a personal history with France." 

In Magro's paintings, buildings such as the Résidence des Pins exist simultaneously as historical 

landmarks and places of everyday life. That duality runs throughout the exhibition. The works are attentive to architecture's public significance, but equally concerned with the private memories that accumulate within it over time.

Watercolor and the art of impermanence

The exhibition's themes are reinforced by Magro's choice of medium.

Her artistic journey began more than three decades ago in Ankara, where she first taught herself oil painting. It was later, while living in Washington, that she discovered watercolor under the guidance of an American watercolorist, a medium she has continued to develop ever since.

Watercolor occupies a distinctive place in the history of travel and architectural painting. During the nineteenth century, artists frequently relied on it to record monuments and landscapes encountered across the Mediterranean and Middle East. Among the most famous was the Scottish painter David Roberts, whose travels through Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria produced detailed studies of temples, churches, mosques, and historic cityscapes. Portable and fast-drying, watercolor allowed artists to work directly on site, capturing not only architectural details but also the changing qualities of light and atmosphere. 

Those characteristics align closely with the exhibition's exploration of memory. Like recollection itself, watercolor relies on suggestion as much as precision. Edges dissolve, forms emerge gradually, and empty space becomes as important as detail.

Magro cites the medium's transparency, fluidity, and luminosity among the qualities that first attracted her.

Watercolor also allowed her to work outdoors and respond directly to the places around her. Unlike oil paint, she noted, it dries quickly and lends itself to sketching on location.

"It enabled me to capture the light, the shadows, and the subtle details that were close to my heart throughout my travels," she said. 

In Lebanon, I found an environment that perfectly resonates with my artistic sensibility.

The result is a body of work concerned less with documentation than with recollection. 

At a moment when travel is increasingly captured through digital photographs, Entre deux rives offers a slower form of remembrance. Through architecture, memory finds a physical form. Through watercolor, those memories remain suspended between past and present and between two shores.