House of Arts & Culture - Beirut, Lebanon

House of Arts & Culture - Beirut, Lebanon
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Art and Culture flows out of the ‘HAC’ and the city flows through it. Hence it becomes a shared hybrid space where people meet and unexpected events occur. The ‘HAC’ is designed on the lines of an ‘evolving spatial diagram’ rising from:

• A Cartesian Grid, towards Emergent Volumes - dematerialization. The physical mass is organized in a functional tight grid. This lattice begins by drawing a lower volume that constitutes a firm stand to the edifice. It`s an inanimate base enclosing all the ‘HAC’ services utilities and parking.

• A Platform, a Core - an open system enabling synergy and free exchange between the public, artists, students and educators. The entire ground plane forms a flexible, fluid and transparent turn-table, conceived as a wide extensive public surface: a landscape of activities. Acknowledging its urban context as fact, it enfolds a forum, the starting point of the whole movement; a crater-like depression generates the explosion of forms, releasing weightless volumes of events, liberating floating bodies, propagating dynamic flows. A threaded public spiral ramp and suspended escalators connect the upper levels in a vertiginous levitating ‘promenade’. The tubular structure is punctual, holding together the exploded volumes and fixing them in elevation. This fixation represents the crucial moment where fact meets expression… the ‘Monumental Moment’.
• Emergent Bodies wrap the main public functions within their alveolar skin (movie theatre, performance and conference halls, exhibition space, documentation center and workshops). Those elevated massive concrete conglomerates merge with an ephemeral envelope of glass, diffusing energy, re-exploring Beirut city through the ‘interstices’ in between. Innovation grows within interspaces. Primitive fossils of knowledge, roaming spirits, mystical reminiscences, furtive silhouettes, striking images of a hidden memory, they exist in complementary contrasts leaving the cut fully exposed, balancing between confrontation and contradiction, mass and lightness, roughness and softness, essence and volatile evanescence. At night, glowing bodies offer attractive inner scenery, drawing visitors into their entrails.

Samer Eid + Rami El Murr + Guy-Roger Conchon + Jean-Pierre Fargialla + Nayla Tawil