In Progress
Status
Date
TBA
Location
Jdeidet Marjayoun, Lebanon
Team
Fouad Samara
Nohad Bechara
Nohad Bechara
The " settlement "
Since the late 1940’s Marjeyoun National College has been committed to providing a non-sectarian, mixed, and progressive education in Lebanon’s South. The campus layout of its buildings embodies the ethos of the school. Built in 1961, the campus was partly funded by the Ford Foundation with Doxiadis Associates as architects. Doxiadis developed the theme of the a-formal, de-centralized, and non-authoritarian “settlement”. A series of linked open spaces are created, like a necklace, by the repetitive use of “ordinary” units.
As part of a new master plan for the campus is an Assembly Hall. The location of the new Assembly Hall, between the disused former dormitory buildings and the basketball court, avoids compromising the campus’ merits on one hand, and anchors this spatially vague part of the campus reinforcing its regeneration, on the other.
A seamless interior
Circulation around and within the Assembly Hall is an extension of the network already in place, and is intended to be seamless and natural. This intention is emphasized in the gallery that holds 100 seats around the main hall that holds 300. Marjeyoun, literally translated, means meadow of springs. Like water cascades down to a pond, so too does the gallery and its terraces down to the stage. Here, there is no authoritarian ‘us and them’. Those on the gallery, terraces, and stage are one and the same. They are all part of the same fabric – same community. Architectonically, the Assembly Hall is also an extension to the fabric designed by Doxiadis, but with an additional level of sophistication and specificity.
The central hall roof is a waffle slab with 30 skylights. Each, a truncated pyramid in shape, is timber framed, lined in plywood, and clad in copper. From within, they bring in soft natural light and provide warmth within the concrete and white space. From outside, they become an abstract of the clusters of the red tiled pitched roofs of traditional houses that are dotted around the town and that are in danger of dereliction or development. They are clearly seen from surrounding classrooms.
A flexible & intimate setting
In order to provide a flexible facility to be used by the entire school campus for multiple events, the furniture can be stored at basement level. The design of the Assembly Hall is a direct interpretation of its function, the inherent qualities of its site, and the college ethos it aims to embody; and follows the modernist canon that a building’s first duty is to the fabric of which it forms part. In an attempt to capture the essence of its function, site, and college ethos, the hall knits itself to its surroundings aspiring to a grand spatial experience, while remaining appropriately simple and intimate.