Located in the port of Beirut, «Stone Garden» materialises the current situation of this context. The project emerges with a new architectural form that translates a sensitive spatial reading of the city. The tower appears as a sculpture drawn on an urban scale. Amorphous, it translates the form gene- rated by the urban regulation. Its openings, of various sizes, hold the memory of the city and offer multiple framings of the sea from the inside. Inhabited by trees and gardens, windows invite nature to climb up to the sky of Beirut. Their variety individualize each housing floor. The project appears in the city as an earthly emergence, its skin laboured by hand with a matter entirely customised and projected on its body.
Currently, the built landscape of Beirut is the result of the geopolitical situation of the country and the political tensions that torment it. A violence that constantly leaves its imprints on the skin of the buildings of the city, giving them shape and finish in different ways. The skeletons of concrete invaded by nature change our concept of what it means to "open" a facade. The landscape blurs the line between an "articulated" window and one that carries the violent memory of war. These "ruins" juxtaposed with some traditional houses preserved and with the concrete mass of identical and modern buildings keep us in a strange state of euphoric melancholy. Together, they constitute a "real" landscape, an almost "natural" landscape.
"Stone Garden" is the materialization of this situation in Beirut. Materialization, in a constructed shape, of life and death, presence and absence, evanescence and timelessness, beauty and brut ... Located near the industrial port of Beirut, the project is set up on the site where the first concrete company was created in the Middle East, where a famous Lebanese architect, now deceased, once had his office. His son, Fouad El Khoury a renowned photographer, takes the ground to give life to a new project emerging on the ruins of the building. In this context, the architecture of this project physically dialogues with this invariable dialectic of absence / presence. It is a sculpted mass, a direct translation of urban regulations announcing the death of the architectural form. On the surface of its raw material, the project addresses the substantial act of opening a "facade" in Beirut. Its openings embody the dialectic visible in the city, they are not only frames of views of different heights, they constitute a subtracted mass expressed in a volume "disemboweled" manifesting the violence of energy dragging them inwards , to become places of life: pleasant "interior" balconies. These openings, in their different scales, then allow singular dwellings on each level, each taking advantage of gardens to live invading the building for a timeless architecture."
"Stone Garden" is the materialization of this situation in Beirut. Materialization, in a constructed shape, of life and death, presence and absence, evanescence and timelessness, beauty and brut ... Located near the industrial port of Beirut, the project is set up on the site where the first concrete company was created in the Middle East, where a famous Lebanese architect, now deceased, once had his office. His son, Fouad El Khoury a renowned photographer, takes the ground to give life to a new project emerging on the ruins of the building. In this context, the architecture of this project physically dialogues with this invariable dialectic of absence / presence. It is a sculpted mass, a direct translation of urban regulations announcing the death of the architectural form. On the surface of its raw material, the project addresses the substantial act of opening a "facade" in Beirut. Its openings embody the dialectic visible in the city, they are not only frames of views of different heights, they constitute a subtracted mass expressed in a volume "disemboweled" manifesting the violence of energy dragging them inwards , to become places of life: pleasant "interior" balconies. These openings, in their different scales, then allow singular dwellings on each level, each taking advantage of gardens to live invading the building for a timeless architecture."
Lina Ghotmeh, Architect
