An urban fabric shaped through collage.

The project is situated on an island facing an important road (Damascus road, Beirut) in the city that doesn’t follow the traditional urban grid of Beirut. The immediate context consists of a collage of buildings juxtaposed along this main road similar to all the post-war Lebanese urban interventions, while at the same time this particular site has a rich historical background. Our methodology was driven by the desire to construct a self-sufficient complex within the site’s limits through the building’s edges alignment to the site limits creating an important mass carved out through several voids creating different experiences in relationship to the city. In an effort to encourage exchange between spaces, a central courtyard (VOID) was introduced that unites all the university functions. This void extends up to the roof through a vertical (staircase) promenade with extensive views framing the city. Through this project we have highlighted the structural cantilevers, the tensions between massive buildings, the coordination of plans and the converging geometries in order to produce forms and shapes which were missing in the ‘Modernist movement’ in producing architecture.
The structure of the resulting building is hidden within a perforated concrete envelope in order to accentuate the mass .here we hide the columns and the beams and empower the mass, a technique that remind us of how the traditional Lebanese architecture was produced but in this project the mass was put under tension. This is what interests me the most because we tend to create a new identity under several agendas.

Some notes:

- Periurban tissu, the urban tissue in Lebanon is not bound it is open there no guidelines in through a road or streets so everybody construct in a chaotic manner.

- Our intervention came to oppose this chaos of construction .we a have a complex program that lead us to highlight the void or what we call it the space in between.

-Instead of adding a building we started from the void which is socially very complex (where people meet) and it was the inverse of what was constructed in Lebanon.

-instead of positioning the university along the site limit and the road we worked out the mass (which comes from the Lebanese culture of construction) ,we carved it out into several masses or building and the void shapes every building into an specific identity where the city of Beirut is brought to the interior campus of our building.

- The buildings are standing out without knowing how their structure work.(we call it the unstable equilibrium)where you can never tell how the mass starts and how it ends it draws new boundaries for the city and the public space in general and question the nature of the urban tissue in Beirut.



Le campus de l’innovation de l’économie et du sport.
L’exemple d’une voie ou l’urbanisme est fait par collage.

Il se situe dans un îlot au bord d’une route ou la structure de la ville traditionnelle est absente. Le contexte ressemble à un collage de bâtiments juxtaposés le long de cette voie, contexte assez caractéristique de l’urbanisation du Liban d’après-guerre, même si cette zone a un passé historique indéniable. Nous avons essayé d’initier par ce projet un mode d’engendrement en venant à la limite de l’îlot tout en construisant un bâtiment assez autonome. Nous y avons essentiellement travaillé les vides pour favoriser l’échange. Partir de ce vide c’était une solution pour maintenir ensemble les différences, (car c’est un projet complexe avec plusieurs programmes) Ce vide se prolonge en toiture comme une grande ballade en surplomb de la ville. Nous avons accentué les porte-à-faux, les tensions, les rapprochements des plans, les convergences géométriques pour constituer de formes de provocation que la culture « moderne » au sens moderniste ne cherchait pas à affirmer. Ici nous cachons les poteaux poutres. Nous demeurons dans une logique de masse qui nous rappelle l’architecture libanaise, mais cette masse est mise sous tension. C’est cela qui m’intéresse car nous tendons vers la construction d’une identité propre.