December 2000 The Lebanese architect and academician, George Arbid, who teaches architecture at the Académie Lebanaise des Beaux-Arts, delivered a public lecture at Darat al-Funun in Amman entitled Modern Architecture in Lebanon, a Critical Survey. (Information on George Arbid can be found on his web site at http://gsd.harvard.edu/~gsd99ga1). The public lecture was the third to be organized during the year 2000 by the Center for the Study of the Built Environment (CSBE) and Darat al-Funun / The Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation, in association with the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. The other two lectures are Deconstructing Beirut's Reconstruction: 1990 - 2000, which was delivered in April by the Lebanese academician and urban planner, Robert Saliba, who is affiliated with Oxford Brookes University, and The Rehabilitation of the Old City of Aleppo, which was delivered in May by the Syrian architect Omar Hallaj, chairman of the Technical Committee for the Rehabilitation of the Old city of Aleppo Project. Also, CSBE and Darat al-Funun, in association with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, had organized in February a lecture by William J. Mitchell, Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, entitled E-topia: The Future of Cities in the Digital Age. (See the Lectures section in the February 2000 news items.)