Office building
2014
Beirut, Lebanon
6600sqm
The site is situated on a corner in downtown Beirut, in the
shadow of two buildings, the Holiday Inn and Burj el-Murr.
Both notorious sniper positions during the long lebanese
civil war and both paradoxically remain militarized. Moreover,
the site is on the edge of Solidere’s jurisdiction, a joint stock
company charged with planning and redeveloping Beirut
Central District following the war. In response, we choose to
re-question both the strict zoning and material regulations as
well as the everyday presence of the spectre of war.
The urban planning department proposed two volumes of
two different heights, where one aligns itself to an adjacent,
old, historically listed house to produce a small public space.
To avoid the resulting obscure outdoor space, that eventually
will be appropriated by the building and made inaccessible to
the public by private security agents, a strategy to detach the
public space from the building formally as well as
programmatically was adopted. Formally, the building was
conceived as an individual volume of a single height aligned
to the adjacent old house to produce a substantial public
space that adheres to the sidewalk as well as to the church’s
public space across the street. To compensate for
the lost area on the ground floor, the successive floor plates
were incrementally increased in area to generate a folding
cantilever hovering above the public space. Programmatically,
the entrance to the building was relocated away from the
public space on the opposite corner of the building and made
visible by the chamfered volume. The detachment of the
public space from the building, and its circumstantial proximity
to a religious one provides an alternative kind of space that
may become an active tool of critique in the city.
The articulation of the striation was a product of two
parameters: the internal spatial ergonomics and the behavior
of the sun. The sun path diagrams translated the context,
entailing the surrounding buildings and landscapes, to
determine the porosity of the striation and its shading
configurations and material characteristics. The striation on
the south facade evolved into horizontal shading devices
whereas the East, West and Northwest facades evolved
into vertical ones. Solidere’s requirement of using stone
as a cladding material was replaced by photo-voltaic
panels in order to add to the performance of the striation,
making it one of the first gold LEED certified project in
Lebanon.