Lebanese architects carrying Beirut abroad

Beirut has been rebuilt, bombed and rebuilt again within living memory, and a city that has had to reinvent itself so often tends to produce architects who are adaptable and skeptical of easy answers. Those traits have carried Lebanese designers well beyond their own borders. In Paris, London, New York, Boston, Dubai and Doha, their buildings and ideas have changed how architecture is made and taught.

The Beirut-born voice in London and Paris

The best-known recent example is Lina Ghotmeh. Born in Beirut in 1980, she leads her practice in Paris. She first drew international attention at 25, when she won the competition for the Estonian National Museum. The museum is built on a former Soviet airfield, and its long, low form carries the line of the old runway through a continuous glazed roof. She has said she was drawn to the project because she identified with a country that had lived through occupation and war. That sense of memory held in a place runs through her work.

It reached London in 2023, when she designed the Serpentine Pavilion in Kensington Gardens. Called À table, it was an invitation to dwell together around the same table, and its canopy was designed to resemble a tree’s foliage. The theme, communal eating, is a very Lebanese one. Her practice has also taken on the British Museum’s Western Range redesign, as well as Ateliers Hermès in Normandy, described as France’s first low-carbon, energy-positive industrial building.

Her home city remains central. Her Stone Garden tower in Beirut was completed shortly after the 2020 port explosion, and it stayed structurally intact. It won Dezeen’s Architecture Project of the Year in 2021. The tower shows how Lebanese identity travels in both directions, a hand-textured concrete building in Beirut and a pavilion in London come from the same sensibility.

The Lebanese mind in American academia

In the United States, Lebanese influence has often come through the design schools. Hashim Sarkis, born in Beirut in 1964, has been Dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning since 2015 and runs Hashim Sarkis Studios, with offices in Boston and Beirut. In 2021 he directed the Venice Architecture Biennale. Its title was How will we live together?, and he argued that the city of the future would grow from a need to share collective spaces and to consume less. It was a Lebanese curator asking the world what a shared life might require.

Amale Andraos, also born in Beirut, studied at McGill and Harvard and worked with Rem Koolhaas in his Rotterdam and New York offices before co-founding WORKac in New York in 2003. Her practice has reached into Africa, with a conference center in Libreville, Gabon. From 2014 to 2021 she was dean of Columbia’s architecture school, the first woman to hold the post. She also co-edited a book on the Arab city and its representation, which shows how much of her work concerns the region she comes from.

Building the Gulf

Nowhere is the Lebanese footprint larger than in the Gulf. In 1956 four professors from the American University of Beirut founded Dar Al-Handasah, which found work in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Jordan within two years. It later acquired the American firm Perkins and Will in 1986 and became a worldwide consultancy. Now, with the passage of the leadership of the group from Kamal Al-Shair to his son Talal, they have led the biggest projects of the gulf. The best example is Riyadh’s King Abdullah Financial District, estimated at $7.8bn and intended to be the largest business zone in the Middle East. Khatib & Alami, established in Beirut in 1963, produced Dubai work including the Creek Tower and Al Reem Tower, and its Dubai project Al Habtoor City won a Global Best Project award from ENR in 2018. Trade press has long listed both firms among the established internationals dominating Gulf design work.

Nabil Gholam works at a more personal scale. The critic Kenneth Frampton singled out his holiday chalets at Faqra as a sign of renewal in Lebanese architecture. His portfolio includes the Emaar Towers in Dubai and a tower for the Doha Oasis development in Qatar.

Provocation and exportable ideas

Bernard Khoury has taken a harder line. B018, his 1998 subterranean club in Beirut, was built on the site of a former refugee camp. His office now has projects in over fifteen countries, among them a Corniche in Dakar, Senegal. He also designed and co-curated the Kingdom of Bahrain’s pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale.

Wael Al Awar, who studied at AUB and began his career in Tokyo, now works between Dubai and Tokyo through the studio waiwai. In 2021 he co-curated the UAE pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where Wetland won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. The installation showed natural salt as a possible alternative to Portland cement.

The most valuable Lebanese quality is a way of thinking. The work stays attentive to memory and to the layers of a place. It is shaped by an expectation that everything can be damaged and must be rebuilt, and it adapts readily to new climates, clients and cultures. Beirut’s architects were trained by a city that kept testing what architecture is for, and that experience has given them a distinct voice wherever they work.