Veronica Simpson talks to architect Lina Ghotmeh concerning the constructing she designed in Beirut, and which fortunately survived the explosion in 2020
Phrases by Veronica Simpson
There’s a unusual however intriguing apply I’ve heard architects point out, the place they ask themselves, within the early design levels, to think about what their proposed constructing would possibly seem like as a damage; the concept, I’ve been instructed, is to make sure you depart a handsome damage. However, maybe better of all, is to design a constructing that may survive a catastrophe intact. Such an end result was not one the Lebanese-born, Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh was actively searching for when she imagined Stone Backyard, a craggy, plant-filled condominium block, its sculpted concrete contours rising 13-storeys excessive between Beirut’s metropolis centre and the docks. However in summer time 2020, when a dockyard fireplace engulfed a close-by warehouse containing ammonium nitrate (which ought to have been disposed of years earlier than), that constructing exploded, tragically inflicting over 200 deaths and leaving a crater 140m extensive. Amazingly, Ghotmeh’s constructing remained intact aside from just a few damaged home windows, regardless of being solely a mile from the centre of the blast.
It had taken ten years to finish this, her first constructing in her dwelling city of Beirut. In early 2020, simply because the constructing was welcoming its first tenants, and earlier than the horrific explosion, Ghotmeh instructed Domus journal she envisaged it as inhabited sculpture, a tribute to the many years of strife her metropolis had seen throughout the 15-year civil battle – the combed concrete facade harking back to the bullet scars you’ll be able to nonetheless see peppering the town’s older constructions – and hopes of a greater future. It was, she stated, ‘an invite to not repeat historical past however to cherish life and cohesion’. These phrases, put up blast, have gained an additional poignancy, given how carelessly a lot of the town’s centre and treasured shoreline has been exploited by profit-seeking speculative growth because the Nineteen Nineties, aided and abetted by the laissez-faire angle of native authorities (at the least a few of whom have been pressured to resign after the blast).
However it appears much more poetic that this constructing nonetheless stands given the friendship and spirit of care during which it was conceived and gestated. The thought was born over a decade in the past when Ghotmeh met photographer Fouad Elkoury, who shared together with her his desires for a photographic archive and artwork basis devoted to recording the town in all its evolutions. He had a possible website for it, on a plot of land left to his household by his famend modernist architect father Pierre el-Khoury, after he died. The thought grew to create such a cultural gathering place within the floor ground of an condominium block, a few of whose flats could be lived in by Elkoury and his household, and the remainder offered to finance the development.
Contained in the Beirut condominium, searching in direction of the dockside. Picture Credit score: IWAN BAAN
Ghotmeh agrees that this shopper, this metropolis, and the state of affairs have been optimum in that they allowed her to evolve the bizarre and porous type of Stone Backyard – impressed by a number of the rugged rock constructions alongside the Lebanese coast – and stipulate integral planters at every degree as a means of prioritising nature. Stone Backyard is a press release towards the informal destruction of the town’s surrounding panorama, she says. However her strategy stays in keeping with a technique she first developed whereas an undergraduate structure scholar on the American College of Beirut, after which developed whereas learning – after which instructing – on the École Spéciale d’Structure in Paris. She calls it ‘the archaeology of the longer term’.
She elaborated on this after we spoke, by Zoom, in spring 2021. ‘I like to consider archaeology as a result of it opens one’s creativeness, to suppose how folks as soon as lived there. Each place is unfinished. I wish to faucet into this sense of the unfinished. Once we are engaged on this undertaking, or different tasks, within the workplace, we’re all the time making an attempt to resolve the historical past of the place, but additionally to… push the studying of the positioning – its typical traits, its traces, the boundary. What does it imply? How does it relate to the context?’
Care and craftsmanship, the way in which Ghotmeh tells it, isn’t just important within the design, detailing and building of a constructing, additionally it is vital in all different points of a undertaking’s evolution. ‘For a very long time the method was stopping and beginning, the making of the constructing and the monetary arrange, discovering the suitable developer,’ she says. ‘The shopper [Elkoury] – he’s an artist, a photographer – he revered my career. He needed to develop a undertaking that’s significant. That was actually treasured. After which additionally the developer that got here to construct the undertaking was superb. He’s somebody who trusted the imaginative and prescient for the undertaking and went together with our experiment with the envelope as a part of a really enriching dialogue.
Ghotmeh at the moment has tasks on the go in Excursions and Normandy
‘With such folks it’s attainable to attain your architectural ambitions. I needed to put a whole lot of myself into the undertaking, however I feel it’s price it as a result of I’ve an emotional attachment to it too.’
However in relation to the dockside catastrophe, one shouldn’t romanticise an excessive amount of: there are basic, structural explanation why the constructing withstood that blast. The entire of the constructing is concrete, in-built situ. So, says Ghotmeh, ‘as structure, it was actually all construction’. Buildings additional away lined with cladding have been ripped aside. ‘Right here, there weren’t any add-ons… It was the integrity of the envelope.’ Having so many apertures, deep balconies and such an unorthodox form should have helped too.
Now, after the ups and downs of 2020, Lina Ghotmeh Structure’s tasks are in full circulation, together with the Nationwide Choreographic Centre in Excursions and a brand new workshop house for luxurious items model Hermès within the Normandy countryside, ending subsequent 12 months. And right here, her archaeological instincts have been rewarded once more with the invention, throughout excavations, of an historical saddlery having beforehand existed on that website (Hermès was based in 1837 as a high-end harness workshop). As she says herself, ‘Typically I ponder whether I’m developing one thing new or revealing what was already there.’
