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| by Hussam D'ana |
Bernard Khoury is a maverick of his time, perhaps best known for
designing B018, a club resembling an underground bunker that was built
on the remains of a refugee camp in Beirut in 1998.
The 44 year-old Lebanese architect is known for his cutting-edge
designs, and is one of the few internationally acclaimed Arab
architects. Khoury established his own firm, DW5, around the same time
he graduated from Harvard with a master’s degree in architectural
studies.
The son of two architects (his father, Khalil Khoury, he describes as
a hardcore modernist), he set out to study architecture at an early
age, by default it seems, and got his Bachelors from the Rhode Island
School of Design.
“I hate labels,” says Khoury in his deep husky voice, accentuated by
his French toned pronunciation. He is always seen dressed in black, and
his blue bulging eyes give off a feeling of solemnness.
Khoury professes his love for speed and shows contempt for anything that romanticizes or is reminiscent of the past.
“I found it very odd to see Columbia University’s logo on a
neoclassical building here in Amman, a building that was probably built,
what, in the past 10 or 20 years, and this is a building [that is
considered] respectful to the past,” he said in interview with 7iber
last month, describing the university’s Middle East research center in
which he was about to deliver a presentation titled “Knowledge, Mobility
and Infrastructure,” part of Studio X – Amman Lab.
Khoury wrestles with what he calls superficial representations of
history in the region, which he believes often fit Western expectations
of the Arab world. He criticizes Arab cities, including Beirut, for
relying on “imports” to build contemporary architecture, and sees it is
ultimately stemming from cultural and political bankruptcy.
“I want to believe that it is possible not to replicate Western
modernity, I want to believe that in our part of the world we can live
certain extremes that are not even possible in the Western world,” he
says.
At the Columbia Research Center auditorium, brimming with architects
and architecture students attending his talk, Khoury presented slides of
his experimental project “Derailing Beirut”, one of his radical
attempts to overturn stereotypes and cliches of his city. A roller
coaster travels through a predetermined course across Beirut, cutting
through the notorious Holiday Inn (a vantage point for militias and
snipers during the Lebanese Civil War), an enthralling and
stomach-churning ride satisfying any tourist’s desire to ‘experience’
Beirut. By agreeing to ride in the capsule, one becomes on the
receiving end, and is fed the stereotypes and postcard images of Beirut,
becoming a passive interlocutor.
“I like to think that I can contradict myself from one street corner to the other,” says Khoury.
Although Khoury describes himself as very much grounded in the
present, he has often embarked on rehabilitating old structures placed
under historical protection by authorities. One of those projects is
Centrale Beirut, a building dating back to the early twentieth century,
now a restaurant/bar in Beirut’s central district. Contrary to
traditional rehabilitation schemes, Khoury refused to re-plaster the
damaged facade, but instead reinforced it with non-interfering
horizontal beams barely touching the decaying skin of the building.
Khoury describes his intervention as violent; he “gutted out” everything
that was inside and replaced it with an inner structure that was
completely different. The restaurant’s bar hangs above the dining area
like a cylindrical air shaft protruding from the roof. The bold
industrial design of the bar contrasts with the crumbling facade and the
renovation schemes implemented by Solidere across downtown Beirut.
Khoury believes that his attempt at “picking up the pieces” was far more
honest than his neighbors, whose formulation of history he describes as
a “transvestite.”
“If it was up to me, I would’ve blown up the house all together, but I couldn’t,” he says.
But Centrale proved to be one of Khoury’s most celebrated and widely
known projects. Despite his weariness of the idea of restoring buildings
to their post-guard state, a practice that has come to define a good
part of downtown Beirut, Khoury cajoled the authorities by keeping the
skin of the building up without adding any make-up to it.
“It’s like I took you, gutted you out and put another animal inside,”
said Khoury. “It’s a very weird and very surgical intervention.”
Centrale was Khoury’s refusal to deny the presence, “to say history
is something that is in perpetual making,” and that his intervention on
the structure is also part of its history.
Another similar project is a villa that is believed to have housed a
brothel at some point, in the Saifi quarter of downtown Beirut. Khoury
picked up the development brief for this project after another architect
submitted the building permit. He did not change much of the permit,
but rather proposed to rebuild it in a drastically different way than it
originally dictated. Again, he kept the initial remains of the ruin
untouched and refused to apply “any sort of makeup” on them. Khoury used
a temporary steel bracing system to prevent further damage to the old
decaying structure, as he did not want the new facades to overlap with
the existing elements or attempt to replicate the existing structure.
According to an interview published in the New York Times in 2006,
Khoury has been approached in the past to work on eight different
projects in the area that Solidere was developing, but none of them were
ever built. The Saifi villa was an exception.
“Our proposal was approved, strangely, by Solidere,” said Khoury. “I
think they realized that this is important for Saifi, and if anything
for BCD, to have another shot.”
Putting things into context
Khoury likes to navigate from one context to the other very carefully. Specificity, he says, is something he is obsessed with.
“What I mean be context is a very specific issue that one may find
sometimes underlying issues below the surface, sometimes they’re way
beyond architecture,” said Khoury. “This is not about syntax, this is
not about an aesthetic, this is not even about technology, this is not
about theory, this is about trying to deal with every specific context
as intricately and specifically as possible.”
One such project is a villa in the Chouf mountains that he was
commissioned to design by a client. The housing project was to be
perched on the plateau of the cedar’s reserve, flattened in 1982 by
Israeli military forces to serve as a makeshift artillery base. Although
never realized, the project is an example of a particular scenario
visualized through the client’s eyes and his desire of inhabiting the
space, a situation in which Khoury developed an intense relationship
with the context.
Khoury’s design for the residential project entailed minimal material
intervention, highlighting transparency and the intermeshing of the
structure with the surrounding environment. The circular façade sinks
mechanically into the ground, transforming the interior into an outdoor
terrace, open from all sides. Moreover, a reservoir collecting rain and
snow water was designed for the house, and served as a spherical shaped
winter swimming pool below the courtyard.
According to Khoury, the project was “impossible” for reasons that go
beyond his proposal, describing the site as very sensitive and
political. But again, this was Khoury’s aberrant attempt to materialize a
client’s specific fantasy and express his relationship with the
territory, departing away from the overused and romanticized red tiled
roofs and triple arches characteristic of houses peppering the Chouf
area.
Out of approximately 122 projects Khoury designed, 62 were aborted.
Khoury’s designs challenge universal perceptions about how we as
social beings should inhabit spaces. One home that Khoury designed for a
client almost a decade ago completely disregards established housing
typologies. The shower is in the closet, the bedroom is in the bathroom,
and the room of the young son is a small wood cabin placed in the
middle of the living room. Another proposed residential project
undermines the concept of having a nucleus for the home. A longitudinal
balcony stretching over the full length of the building creates an
outdoor pathway, joining the bedrooms and the kitchen on every level,
thus allowing navigation of the different parts of the house from the
outside instead of the inside.
“Some projects may look unconventional for some people, [but] it’s
not about breaking conventions,” said Khoury. “I think a project is a
relationship with a client, a mutual understanding, and intelligence has
to come from both sides.”
