Careful examination of architecture and building motifs in Arab contexts leads to rejection of nativist doctrine or what is or is not “Arab.” The region’s design traditions are, in fact, a result of continuous interaction with influences from different corners of the Middle East as well as from the West. Part of indigeneity has been enthusiastic uptake of the foreign, including a two-way flow of technologies and aesthetic perspectives of modernism. This is made especially evident for the case of Beirut, where it becomes difficult to describe, much less proscribe, what is an ‘Arab’ motif, or an ‘Arab’ building, or an ‘Arab’ material. As Gulf cities make evident, aiming to recreate some fixed aesthetic of the past risks kitsch and stultifies potential for actual creative evolutions in a problematic contemporary context.