Last year, I wrote about Beirut's underground rock scene, and earlier this year about a few restaurants that are experimenting with regional traditions. Here's a quick overview of some of the more noteworthy Beirut architects and designers who are finding inspiration in their heritage to create a new Levantine look.
Bernard Khoury, Lebanon's most famous architect, takes locations and buildings associated with the Civil War and gives them a Blade Runner retro-fit. My friend Karim Ben Khelifa took this morning-after photograph (above) of a Khoury designed nightclub -- B018 -- that used to be a bunker and that now blows the brain cells of ecstasy and techno loving teenagers with a moving ceiling that open up to the stars in summer. Khoury's other work includes an underground sushi restaurant near what used to be a main checkpoint on the Greenline that separated Christian East Beirut from Muslim West Beirut, and a proposal to paint a tubular sixties era concrete movie theatre half destroyed by artillery fire a bright shade of pink.
Nada Debs, a Lebanese furniture designer who grew up in Japan, uses the the ornate Levantine and Damascene style -- mother of pearl inlays and arabesques -- refined to a minimal, modernist essence.
On the more-is-more side of the furniture design spectrum, Maria Hibri and Hoda Baroudi have given dumpster-diving a Levantine makeover. They find pieces of antique and modernist furniture and then upholster them in Oriental textiles, and sometimes, Maria's daughter's, corduroy pants.
And just for fun, here's a nargileh, a traditional water pipe for smoking flavored tobacco that's a standard fixture in Arab cafes, designed by Sybille Abillama.
If Beirut remains an incubator for creative talent despite its wars and upheavals, avant-garde design in Lebanon remains an elite pastime, the purview of a secular, hipster scene. A country interested in nation-building would be using these people -- and like-minded intellectuals -- to transform its cities, its institutions, and curriculum. But Lebanon has no president, its parliament rarely meets, and most civil society organizations have a sectarian agenda. The re-imaginative power of Lebanese art ends up merely decorating the homes of wealthy foreign patrons, rather than transforming how people live in the Middle East.
Article reprinted from The TIME Middle East Blog. Top photo credit: Karim Ben Khelifa, Bottom photo credit: Atelier S/Z
Tags: Architects, B018, Bernard Khoury, Civil War, Green Line, Levantine, source: TIME, Sybille Abillama
