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Status
Unbuilt

Date
1992

Location

Qoronet Chahwan, Lebanon

Team
Fouad Samara

Re-interpreting the traditional Lebanese house 

This project for five luxurious 400 square meter dwellings on a squarish site overlooking Beirut and the coast has a familiar brief within the developer market in Lebanon.
The specific concerns of this project were two. Firstly, to reinterpret the Lebanese house with a central hall, seen as the traditional Lebanese housing type par excellence; and secondly, to imbue a sense of ‘houseness’, identity and spatial luxury to the dwellings rarely achieved in conventional flats of this size and type.

 

Building massing 

In pursuing these concerns, the mass of the building steps in plan terminating the entrance into the site on one hand, and opening up views of Beirut and the coast on the other. The garden flat is given its own entrance and a massive light well, which also serves to order the pedestrian and vehicular movements into and around the building. From the ground floor up, the building is divided into two parts with the stair, lift and water tanks acting as an expressed vertical spine. On either side of this spine are two duplexes stacked one on top of the other. The lower duplexes are entered off a private court at ground floor level; the upper duplexes off a large double height gallery at the third floor.


 


 

The tartan grid 

Plans are ordered along a tartan grid that provides order and a certain amount of flexibility. The structure, placed along the tartan grid, is exposed with stone clad infill panels within that.