This short film looks at the work of the Lebanese architect Antoine Tabet (1907-1964) told through two of his buildings and two protagonists. One building, the Sagesse College built in 1937 in Beirut is introduced by his son, the Lebanese historian and president of the Order of Enginneers and Architects in Lebanon, Jad Tabet. The other, the Raja Rais Housing Complex built around the same time in Haifa through a devoted preservationist and head of the Haifa Municipality, Waleed Karkabi. Despite the similarities between these buildings and the obvious continuities of the work of Tabet across the boders of the Middle East, the story of his work remains today largely inaccessible for both protagonists as they can not officially work together or exchange their knowledge. This film points to the shared space, shared history, shared ecology and shared humanity of a region torn and divided by political borders. 3 Hours by Car Germany, 2019 Centre for Documentary Architecture

The Centre for Documentary Architecture (CDA) is an interdisciplinary project that explores buildings as documents and built environments as archives in which history is inscribed. CDA is composed of architects, filmmakers, artists, programmers, historians and theorists who undertake a number of collective and individual research projects in contested areas or historical periods where architecture could be used as a registrar of political relations and transformations. This website is a digital archive that contains a variety of media, ranging from interviews and material studies to photography and archival research collected by the CDA. As a tool under construction, it is meant both for historians and for the interested public. The archive simultaneously engages with finding new access to the physical materiality of the objects of our analysis — artefacts, buildings, environments — and attempts to chart the web of relations, connections and patterns in which these material objects are nested.