حديقة الحجر – مجمع سكني ومعرض فنيبيروت, لبنان

حديقة الحجر - مجمع سكني ومعرض فني | 2020
لينا غطمة
بيروت | لبنان

Beirut is a permanent archeology. Buried 7 times through the ages, the city tells the story of our ancestors. Currently, its built landscape reflects its recent history. Ruined buildings invaded by wilderness juxtaposed with red tiled roofed traditional houses that still bear witness to the architecture of this Mediterranean city. Located in the port area, « Stone Garden » materializes the Architect’s perception of her birthplace.

The project emerges with a new architectural form that translates a sensitive spatial reading of the city. Taking its roots from its context, it portrays the capacity of architecture to act as a healing tool and an active player in building resilience at times of crisis. Transforming tumultuous events into a creative opportunity, the tower appears as a sculpture drawn on an urban scale. Amorphous, it translates the form generated by the urban regulation. Its openings, of various sizes, hold the memory of the city and offer multiple framings of the sea from the inside.

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Inhabited by trees and gardens, windows invite nature to climb up to the sky of Beirut. The variety of their sizes individualize each residential floor generating new forms of communal spaces. The project appears in the city as an earthly emergence, its skin is custom designed. It is all labored and crafted by the hands of the many workers fleeing the neighboring wars. Projected earth, cement and fibers, the building’s skin is combed, and its making process is the result of incremental experimentation. It invites artisans to participate in the emotional realm of architecture, transforming architecture into a curing tool bringing people together.

Today, the tower has survived the major explosion in the city. It rises as a living archeology, a host of life, memory, and nature. It houses living spaces as well as the Mina Image Center an art platform dedicated to image, photography, debates, and reflections on the Middle East.

Located barely a mile away from the port area, I drew this building as an expression of the city’s history, a reaction to the war-torn Built scape that I strangely got accustomed to. I needed to draw an earthly presence amid the glass mirroring heights competing for the Mediterranean sky. Stone Garden attempted to quietly sit by the seaport, waving distantly at the sea visitors of the city. I wanted this ‘tower’ amorphous, as is the building regulations that helped me shape it. Hand sculpted, it emerges as a healing tool from the ground, or as I baptized it an “Archeology of the Future”. Its architecture wants to belong to earth, to remain anchored in its terrain. It embraces with generosity its adjacent yet modest buildings. It transforms the hollowed skins born naked in Beirut into positive havens of life. Its asymmetrical windows, dance around its sculpted mass, harvesting nature at heights.