His buildings take the narratives of their contexts and articulate them in new and evocative ways, kindling a conversation that speaks of Lebanon, its past, and its people living in the present. But this conversation, Khoury states in an exclusive interview with Ya Libnan, is poignantly absent from much of the nation's modern architecture, as it is in large swathes of society at large.

If the walls we live within, the streets we walk down and the buildings we spend our days in speak to us, what do they speak of? Do they whisper of home, declare power and status, express identity and place? For most of us, our built context colours our lives in more ways than we can know and articulates who we are and, indeed, who we wish we were.

Identity is at the heart of what Bernard Khoury, one of Lebanon's foremost architects, designs and builds. In his diverse canon of work, he strives to kindle an accurate and articulate relationship between the structures he creates, the contexts in which they reside and the people who use them.

When the British philosopher Alain de Botton traveled through the Dutch town of Vijfhuizen a few years ago, he marveled at the houses there that spoke of the culture and history they were borne of, but also the contemporary setting in which they resided. "From a distance, the village looked traditional," he writes in his book The Architecture of Happiness. What he found, on closer inspection, was a "mutually respectful conversation between past and present." The shapes and structures evoked the templates of traditional Dutch domestic architecture, while the materials, wood, steel and glass spoke undeniably of the present day. "They looked like reinventions of the archetypal Dutch home that had succeeded in succumbing neither to nostalgia nor to amnesia."

"The houses," de Botton writes, "knew how to accommodate themselves to the realities of the modern Netherlands while remaining quietly aware of their lineage."

Such an accurate aesthetic identity is missing from much of the Beirut architecture, Khoury says, especially that erected during the reconstruction boom of the 1990s. Many of the products of this, he said, failed to reflect the aesthetic and practical requirements of a society emerging from fifteen years of Civil War.

Khoury, who has worked prolifically at home and abroad, claims that many of Beirut's reconstructed areas are the fruits of a hyper capitalist mentality, created from preconceptions rather than from a thoughtful reflection on the post-war context in which these buildings stand, or the people serve.

Upon his return to Lebanon in the early 1990s, Khoury soon discovered that "the reconstruction project I was expecting was never going to happen," he told an audience at April's Homeworks IV Forum on Cultural Practice.

As early as 1982, a scale model of Beirut's restored city center had been produced and unveiled, compounding Khoury's idea that much of the reconstruction was inflexible to the new reality Lebanese society would find itself in once the war had drawn to a close. It also reinforces the fact that other, namely financial, motives were guiding the process of reconstruction, long before the conflict had reached its twilight.

Khoury is the first to admit that most of his work appears in the private sphere, but insists on the communicative approach he takes to creating a building; that is the communication between form, function and context.

"What projects like Nijme Square provide is a watered down version of history," he told Ya Libnan at his Karantina studio. "What we have now in Beirut is a city deeply rooted in the past and looking to the future, void of the present. I don't understand this." This, he said, reflected wider social and political undercurrents that encouraged people to turn away from the realities of the present; a simmering stalemate that reached a bloody flourish in May. "Things are continuously swept under the carpet," he said. "At some point the carpet had to explode."

As a student at Harvard University in 1991, Khoury developed a project that attempted to approach the complex question of post-war reconstruction, and confront the reality that lay ahead. 'Evolving Scars' involved the wrapping of buildings damaged and destroyed during the Civil War in a translucent shell. The buildings within were then dismantled piece by piece, and the rubble inserted into the clear walls around the diminishing skeleton. What then emerged was a new structure, residually similar to the building that had once stood in its place, but transformed to reflect the new context in which it resided. These would have been buildings that, as de Botton would put it, allowed a 'mutually respectful conversation' between what had gone before, the reality of the present and what lay ahead.

"I look at buildings as devices," Khoury says, "as active instruments that allow moments to happen, between people, between an individual and the built context he finds himself in."

Thus a building's identity, like that of the communities that live and work within it, flexes and develops with the passage of time and it is this, Khoury argues, that buildings should reflect and actively instigate.

His works, he said, are "modest interventions" that are rooted deeply in the minutiae of the plots they stand on. "I don't believe in making monuments," he states, "I find it more interesting to articulate the very small histories of each piece of land I build on in my work than to make bold, palatable statements about history or politics."

"None of my buildings look like each other," he said. "The day they do, I'll know it's time to give up." His buildings are woven with understated comments on their surroundings and the people who use them, in an attempt to articulate the realities and paradoxes of present-day Lebanon through architecture. The long arm that juts from the People restaurant (formerly Black Box) on the Dbaye highway, for example, is supported by a column embedded with a cash machine; hinting at the sustaining force consumerism has become in society. Equally, his own home, built in a building constructed by his father, breaks free from models of domestic architecture to reflect the tastes, needs and attitudes of his family.

One of Khoury's most striking projects is his Yabani R2 Japanese restaurant on Beirut's Damascus Road. Built in 2002, the underground restaurant asserts its presence on ground level through a striking fourteen meter high metal tower that rises from the street and allows natural light from above to stream into the restaurant below. "When we built it," Khoury said, "almost none of the surrounding buildings had been redeveloped. They were full of refugees and local people who were squatting there."

Yabani's diners are then taken down into the bowels of the restaurant, away from the reality above ground. The seating in the restaurant is organized around the reception area, heightening an awareness of those arriving and those already there, but denying the grim reality outside.

Reflecting on his most feted project, Karantina's B 018 nightclub, which opened ten years ago this year has, Khoury says that a building can often transform itself, or be transformed, once it has been completed. "B 018 was built as a temporary structure," he says, "It was only meant to have a five-year life span, but 2003 came and went so I suppose what I wanted to say in it is still relevant today."

Located where, in January 1976, local militants launched an attack that destroyed the surrounding community, B 018 is a structure that looked to straddle the divide between a violent past and a vibrant present. Khoury did not want B 018 to participate in the "naive amnesia" inherent in so many of the reconstruction projects emerging elsewhere, but participate, in some ways, it did.

It became, in some quarters, a palatable symbol for an outside world looking to package post-war Lebanon. "One German journalist described me working in the foundations of the building, walking over corpses and uprooting skeletons from the earth. This is absurdly untrue and fetishizes war and its consequences in a fairly distasteful way," he said.

"But you never know how your work will be received," he said, "sometimes people respond to a building in strange ways, and they become symbols you never intended them to be." Khoury continues to strive to respond to building's location in an accurate and creative way. "I like rough terrain" he says with a smile, implying that Lebanon is a dictionary of a sorts for a contemporary architect seeking his architectural vocabulary.

The identity of a building is at its strongest when it evokes the past but pays heed in equal measure to the present in which it stands, and the future it will be a part of. It is from this, Khoury argues, buildings can speak in the most accurate, most articulate terms to those whose lives they shape.

B 018 club retractable roof (photo credit: bernardkhoury.com)

B 018 club interior (photo credit: bernardkhoury.com)

The morning after at B 018 (photo credit: Karim Ben Khelifa)

Yabani R2 restaurant (photo credit: bernardkhoury.com)

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