An extremely narrow building standing on a merely 120-square-meter piece of land is standing in Beirut, Lebanon. It was built only because one man wanted to block the ocean’s view of another man. The locals of the area call the building ‘the grudge’ and indeed, they are right about it. The men who own the two properties are brothers and each of them inherited a plot.
After the inheritance was allocated, they did not come to an agreement on how they should develop their properties. The man who owned the larger plot did not want to make an agreement with his brother that might not cost him a lot of land value. The younger brother who owned the smaller piece of land decided to build an erect building which is more like a wall. He did this in the hope that his brother’s property worth will decline since the view of the ocean has been blocked.
The building he built is almost 14-meters high and is not wider than a meter. If you look at it from the front, it seems like it is a lot thinker than it actually is. This effect is added to the building by the balconies and windows that give the impression of a spacious room behind it.
The residents say that The Grudge or Al-Ba’sa in Arabic was built in 1954. The wall that is slightly liveable is 4-meters deep and the thinnest part is only sixty centimeters. Each floor has two apartments and each apartment is a series of rooms joined together by a corridor. As space gets narrower, the room also reduces in size until it actually ends in a very tight place that is more like a walk-in closet. The apartment on the other side is wider. Each room has two windows and one of them open towards the brother’s plot and the other window opens towards the Mediterranean’s beautiful view.
Even though the building is practically useless, the owner has no intention of demolishing it. Since after demolishing, we won’t be able to build anything in its place under the city’s new building and zoning laws. Therefore, the building stands as it is and is rented from time to time basis. The ground floor of the building was rented to a mechanic in 2014 who runs a shop there.
Jealousy is never a good thing, isn’t it?