The Beirut Port Kawai

On August 4, 2020, the Beirut port explosion tore through the city. In an apartment facing the harbour, a Kawai grand piano was reduced to hundreds of fragments, case split, soundboard cracked, action scattered across the room.

Most workshops would have called it a loss. The atelier catalogued every fragment, dried and stabilised the wood, and began a fourteen-month reassembly: soundboard repaired rib by rib, case rebuilt around the original rim, action rebuilt key by key.

In late 2021 the piano played again, the first piano ever reassembled by hand in the Middle East. LBC filmed the story. The family kept their piano. The city kept a small proof that broken things can be made whole.