'Stone Garden' Housing & Art Gallery | Lina Ghotmeh—Architecture

Beirut’s contemporary cityscape is the product of the country’s geopolitical situation and tormented political tensions. Violence has left its mark on the city’s buildings’ skins, hollowing them. The project invites nature to invade a concrete skeleton changing one’s conception of what a façade opening might mean to this context, blurring the boundary between the articulated window and the memory of a past event. This new architecture will stand juxtaposed with the few remaining traditional tiled-roof houses and the identical concrete masses of today’s construction.
“Stone Garden” materializes the history of Beirut, a built form of life and death, presence and absence, evanescence and timelessness, beauty and rawness… Located near the industrial port of the city, the project takes the site where the first concrete company in the Middle East was established, where a passed notable Lebanese architect had his office inheriting this land to his son photographer of renown, Fouad El Khoury.
The proposal emerges like an emotional sculpture, creating a new form rising up with its earth-covered concrete. Custom-made by the many hands of artisans fleeing the neighboring countries. The project openings, not merely viewing frames, of various heights and sizes become mass-subtractions transformed into enjoyable planted `bow windows’, imbued with energy. The asymmetry of the openings animates the façade and make the dwellings on each of the floors totally unique in a city where individualized dwelling has become scarce.