Nabil Gholam Architects' unbuilt proposal for a future bank headquarters competition, a.spire, has been named the winner of the Office-Future project category at World Architecture Festival 2016. The project, designed for the Mar Mikhael neighborhood of Beirut, Lebanon, is a flexible intervention meant to both meet the client's needs in the present day and adapt to its long-term evolution.
109 Architectes has released its proposal for the Beirut Museum of Modern Art (BeMA), for which a competition was recently held. The proposal was shortlisted, but did not ultimately win. In this proposal, BeMA is a box—“a generic form that belongs to everyone”—based on a scene in The Little Prince, where a traveler is asked to draw a sheep. The Prince rejects each sheep drawing until the traveler draws a box, inside of which a sheep is hidden. “The cube is a neutral form in the Little Prince’s search for identity. Within it, he sees what he wants to see.”
Within this generic box, visitors will thus be able to project their views of Beirut—the city’s chaos, diversity, creativity, history, streets, people, and more.
HW architecture, led by Lebanese/French architect Hala Wardé, has been chosen as the winners of an international competition to design the new BeMA: Beirut Museum of Art in Lebanon. The new museum will be located in the heart of Beirut and features a “central campanile tower” that will rise nearly 400 feet into the air as it becomes a new cultural beacon for the city.
The winning proposal was selected from a shortlist of 13 firms by an all-star international jury, chaired by Lord Peter Palumbo, which included architects Rem Koolhaas, Lord Richard Rogers, George Arbid, Dr. Farès el-Dahdah, and Dr. Rodolphe El-Khoury as well as Serpentine Galleries curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Dame Julia Peyton-Jones. The late Zaha Hadid, who was active on the jury until her passing in 2015, remains an honorary member of the jury.
Snøhetta has won a competition to design the new headquarters for Banque Libano Francaise (BLF) in Beirut, Lebanon. The building will feature a geometric facade and several large outdoor terraces carved from the built volume to create a vibrant workplace community. The project marks Snøhetta’s first ever commission in Lebanon.
The Association for the Promotion and Exhibition of the Arts in Lebanon (APEAL) has announced a shortlist for the design of a new modern and contemporary art museum in Beirut, Lebanon. The yet to be named museum will be located in the city’s historic center on land owned by the Université Saint Joseph and directly opposite the National Museum of Beirut. A masterplan for the site includes new campus facilities for the university, a business center, and the museum, all sharing green common areas and underground parking.
City Debates 2016 stems from a relational and multi-scalar understanding of urban policy as an assemblage of ideas and tools that circulate and transform. We seek to examine how international aid promotes the mobility of urban policy ideas, and mobilizes a range of stakeholders, and technologies in the process. We explore these questions by investigating two sets of urban policies: regional planning, and refugee policies.
Lebanese architecture practice PARALX has won the AIA in Los Angeles' Merit Design Award for its T3 high-rise tower in Beirut. The tower is a part of a larger development scheme in the burgeoning Beirut Digital District (BDD) that will include 12 buildings and over 150,000 square meters of office spaces, apartments, hotels, shops, and entertainment facilities.
T3 will host cafes and restaurants on the ground level, with residential apartments located throughout the upper floors, all targeted towards the creative class that is moving into the area labeled as “Lebanon’s Silicon Valley.”
The David Adjaye-designed Aishti Foundation in Beirut, Lebanon is nearing completion. Located in central Beirut, the building replaces former warehouses, housing both an art gallery and retail space. This unique “juxtaposition of art and shopping” inspired Adjaye and Associates “to create a design for an entirely new typology that would integrate two, often conflicting, worlds,” write the architects in a press release.
The Association for the Promotion and Exhibition of the Arts in Lebanon (APEAL) is planning to open a museum of modern and contemporary art in Beirut by 2020.
The Association for the Promotion and Exhibition of the Arts in Lebanon (APEAL) has launched a competition for the design of a new modern and contemporary art museum in Beirut, Lebanon. Architects of Lebanese origins based in Lebanon or globally are invited to submit entries for the yet-to-be-named museum, which is set to open in 2020.
Developed from an idea by Publicomm, ARCHMARATHON is an International Architecture event that brings together 42 Architecture Design Studios in a unique and unprecedented format. The first edition took place in November 2014 in Milan and was a great success with the public and highly appreciated by the participants. After the tremendous success of this first edition, the FEDERATION OF LEBANESE ENGINEERS and Publicomm organize a special edition focusing on architects originally from the Arab and Mediterranean Countries. As a result, there will be a special edition held in Beirut, Lebanon from the 8th to the 10th of October 2015.
This edition of Section D, Monocle 24's weekly review of design, architecture and craft, dives into Beirut Design Week exploring "what Lebanese designers can show the world." In this show Josh Fehnert examines why Domus have decided to start an academy in Milan, speaks to Dutch typographer Joep Pohlen about his ultimate type reference guide, and assesses some of the architectural similarities between Istanbul and London. While the likenesses are not immediately obvious, both cities are currently undergoing an unprecedented property boom. Istanbul, a city with no strategic masterplan, is growing fast and there are lessons to be learnt from London's comparatively porous urban realm.
New York-based SOMA Architects has announced plans for an 11-story residential development in Beirut. Cantilevering over a protected 1920s house, “BOBO’s” steel exoskeleton and concrete core will support 13 new residences on top ground floor retail in the Lebanese capital’s Mar Mikhael district.
