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    Bursting the Bubble

    Story by Bethan Ryder


    Beirut's City Centre Building, aka ‘the bubble', as it stands now Below: Bernard Khoury's stainless-steel-clad renovation is expected to be finished by 2006
    Driving into Beirut from the airport, one of the fi rst things you see is a hulking great concrete bubble. Stranded like a beached whale on asphalt, blackened by neglect and the long civil war that raged around it, it's an arresting sight. Although broken and pockmarked by bullets, this unusual edifi ce remains recognisable as one of the few surviving icons from Beirut's ‘golden age' of Modernist architecture. And yet, until very recently, it was destined for the wrecking ball.

    Designed in 1965 by Lebanese architect Joseph Philippe Karam, the Beirut City Centre Building, aka the ‘bubble', ‘blob', or ‘egg', was built during the prosperous post-colonial days of the Lebanon republic. It originally housed a theatre and exhibition hall with six underground levels for shopping and parking. Today, beyond hosting illegal raves in the 1990s, it stands empty – a blot on an urban landscape virtually devoid of cultural institutions.

    Solidere, a private real-estate company, announced the bubble's pending demolition in 2003, citing fi nancial reasons. As a 6,000-square-metre chunk of real estate overlooking Martyr's Square in the desirable Downtown district, the site was worth some $40 million – a veritable gold mine, considered by Solidere too valuable to waste on a brutal architectural relic of the past.

    Then, suddenly last year, Solidere U-turned and commissioned local architect Bernard Khoury to resuscitate the dormant carcass. It was to be reborn as an arts centre with a seven-year lease. So what made them change their minds? International opinion and its sheer symbolic appeal, says Khoury. “Many architects who toured the city with Solidere – guys like Philippe Starck, Jean Nouvel, Steven Holl – all asked, ‘What are you doing with that?' And so I was asked to come up with a temporary solution.”

    The chain cigar-smoking, 35-year-old architect has achieved international acclaim for a clutch of entertainment venues completed over the past seven years in his native city. Architecture critics, hedonistic, moneyed Beirutis and cosmopolitan visitors adore his bunker-club B018 and the restaurants Yabani and Centrale. Most are intrigued by these unfamiliar-looking venues that seem like alien spacecraft plonked in the middle of an ever mutating city. Strangely though, none of these buildings has been built to last. “My projects are about an alternative exploitation,” he explains. “They have a limited life span. They are not developed in terms of total build-up area, but one day a developer with enough money will buy these plots and my projects will be gone. I used their temporary nature to my advantage.”

    It's worth mentioning that creating challenging architecture runs in the family. Khoury's father, Khalil Khoury, is an eminent local architect who favoured experimental, expressionist Brutalist architecture. Although Khoury fi ls resides with his young family in his father's residential complex – the Manar beach resort north of Beirut city – few other examples of his father's work remain. “My father created some amazing things but many of them are being destroyed,” says Khoury, “because Beirut doesn't appreciate what it has yet.”

    At least it seems they've recognised the talents of the young architect in their midst. Although a temporary solution, the B.C.D (Beirut Central District) commission marks a turning point for Khoury – and for the city. Like other local architects, Khoury has so far remained outside Solidere's realm. When he fi rst returned home during the mid '90s from studying architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and from Harvard where he took a Masters in Architectural Studies, he was dismayed by the lack of opportunities in Beirut for ambitious young architects like himself.

    Bursting with theories about how to rebuild his beloved city – once considered the Paris of the Levant – with exciting architecture and new cultural institutions, he found himself cast   aside as an idealistic exile with no role to play. Like others, he was critical of the limited forms of recuperation going on. Most controversial was the single-minded, nostalgic approach to reconstruction and dominance of Disney-perfect, manicured reproductions of French Mandate and Ottoman architecture. He returned to New York, but was luckily lured back in 1997 by his friend Nagi Gebrane, a musician and club-promoter, who asked him to create a dance club in the La Quarantine district of Beirut.

    The huge military-style bunker with a retractable roof, which sank deep below the ground and was bordered by a busy highway, was Khoury's big break. It was a chance for him to confront what he calls the “collective amnesia” over the war, and to demonstrate how architecture could be progressive in Beirut's present context. The design includes subtle references to the infamous battle that took place there in 1976. Paradoxically, B018 may share the characteristics of a memorial, yet it's alive with dancing. A fi tting monument for a city with a history like Beirut's.

    It's more than a monument, though. As Khoury is growing a little tired of critics sentimentalising his architecture, B018 should be recognised as a fantastic nightlife venue and as a feat of engineering. “Building contractors told me B018 would be impossible to construct,” he says, “so instead I improvised with materials used in truck-building [such as the hydraulic retractable roof system]. It was important to realise I could work outside the building industry and really get things done.”

    He took a similar approach to the restaurant projects that followed. Yabani was about dramatising the absurdity of its very existence. “I was uncomfortable building a sushi restaurant that was going to charge $50 per head next to people living in very bad situations. It was strange to be building a public structure that was just for a restaurant, not a museum, or opera house, or palace of justice, but a restaurant. So I made it a pretentious landmark for what it is.”

    The silver tower, resembling a rocket-tail embedded in the earth, signals the existence of the subterranean restaurant. Patrons descend via a circular elevator, their entrance witnessed by diners seated at a high bar surrounding the lift shaft.

    Centrale features similar oversized mechanical gadgetry the roof-top bar is reached via an elevator that ascends in full view of the ground-fl oor restaurant and locks into the horizontal cylinder of the bar. Like B018, the wow factor comes courtesy of a roof that slides back to reveal the open sky, like a convertible car.

    Beirut's fl ashy, jet-set crowd love his venues, and since he has wisely taken equity in the restaurants, Khoury can often be spied enjoying the scene too – earning him soubriquets like ‘the bad boy of the Beirut night scene'. However, the recent Beirut Central District ‘bubble' commission and future projects should draw attention away from such fl ighty labels. Execution work has started on the B.C.D already; it should be completed by 2006.

    “We're going to clad [the Beirut City Centre Building] in a totally refl ective skin of stainless steel that distorts everything around it,” explains Khoury. “There will be a huge screen at one end that will project a [web] portal about the building itself. It's not decided yet what will be inside the actual bubble, but the ground fl oor will be a huge public square that people can walk across. Black boxes with glass tops will offer people views of what's going on below.”

    “MOST ARE INTRIGUED BY THESE UNFAMILIAR-LOOKING VENUES THAT SEEM LIKE ALIEN SPACECRAFT PLONKED IN THE MIDDLE OF AN EVER MUTATING CITY.

    Khoury now has several banks as clients, too. “During the war the entire Beirut Central District was bombed out except for the bank street; it remained untouched without a single window broken. This tells you a lot about this country. Banks are extremely powerful and I'm very happy to be working for them.” One local bank has been completed near the Syrian border and another facelift is planned for a city centre bank. Each window of the new façade will feature a windscreen wiper, making them completely self-cleaning.

    “I WAS UNCOMFORTABLE BUILDING A SUSHI RESTAURANT THAT WAS GOING TO CHARGE $50 PER HEAD NEXT TO PEOPLE LIVING IN VERY BAD SITUATIONS.

    Such mechanical gizmos are very Khoury. He has been known to remark that “in Beirut you are your car,” and often points out that even McDonald's has valet parking. (If you're asking, he is having a vintage Lancia reconditioned and his other car really is a Porsche – a red 1970s 911 that he bought off his uncle sits gleaming inside his Quarantine studio.)



    Yabani, a sushi restaurant at the top of
    Monot Street. Patrons descend to eat via the elevator.
    His forthcoming restaurant project for the luxury designer store Aïshti also fetishises the automobile. Located next door to an Aïshti store, on a busy highway just outside the city, an aerial camera photographs each car as it arrives in the driveway. This image is then beamed onto the façade, revealing each guest's arrival to other passing motorists. Khoury even describes his largest-scale project to date, Fintas Market in Kuwait, in car analogies. “It's the Formula One of shopping malls,” he says, comparing its high performance design to the Lotus 7 sports car.

    Visuals reveal a huge (380m long), glass, rocket structure semi-buried in the sand. A tail-fi n marks the entrance and also provides shoppers with the thrill of a vertical drop ride. Strapped onto a sofa they can experience the rush of being fl ung up into the humidity outside, and then shot back down into the artifi cial oasis of the mall. For Khoury this “symbolises the madness of consumption”. Like his other projects to date, it challenges preconceptions and will no doubt become one of Kuwait's star attractions.

    Until now Khoury's projects may have been temporary, but judging by the myriad of schemes he has in the pipeline, he's someone who's clearly here to stay.

       
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