"You never go to sleep in Beirut. It is a city that keeps you awake."

Bernard Khoury, Lebanese architect and founder of DW5, wrote these lines in a 2007 issue of ICON, part of his contribution to 50 manifestos by contemporary architects. Khoury—internationally recognised and celebrated, a veritable star (terms he would surely disavow)—has independently, and along with his studio of collaborators, taken on several projects that, at times, challenge and, at other times, play on the current status quo of the development sector and the territory on which the buildings are located. At the time of writing, his office is working on mixed-use developments in the US and Senegal, as well as a digital media learning hub in Beirut, while having recently completed residential developments in Lebanon.

Early in his career, Khoury tackled the design of entertainment spaces such as clubs, bars and restaurants—projects meant to be torn down in a matter of months or years as a result of incessant reconstruction during the period in which they were built—ending up with the label of “entertainment architect”. Unlike most of his contemporaries who have been as equally lauded as him, Khoury’s focus remains commercial architecture, real estate developments, shopping malls and office towers that hope to represent the true context of Beirut. The city—on the one hand, growing due to a development boom facilitated by a free market, while on the other, marked by civil war—is central not only to understanding Khoury’s practice but the man himself.

While Beirut has come to be known as a vibrant metropolis with a dynamic nightlife, the city is marred by its complex histories of strife, if the recent attacks on the city and state provide any clue. Reconstruction efforts (beginning in the early 90s with real estate company Solidere’s master plan for regeneration following the Civil War) have often tried to erase these signs of degradation, instead presenting a sanitised version of events and a return to an idealised Lebanon. This corporate, developer-driven perspective that presents picturesque historic quarters and sleek glass towers forms part of Khoury’s critique of such redevelopment efforts. As Khoury passionately argues, by ignoring that which had shaped the built environment quite drastically in the period of conflict and resorting to history represented by an outside perspective, the developers and the foreign colleagues who were invited to design buildings in the area (among them luminaries such as Steven Holl and Norman Foster) display a “naive understanding” of a country with “a complex history and social fabric”.

Instead, Khoury’s projects demonstrate a certain unwieldy drama—the products of a dialogue with the structures’ political and economic contexts—painting the city’s image in a state of constant flux. Often, especially early on, Khoury worked on ‘difficult sites’ at the forefront of land that was earmarked for development within view of the remnants of war-ravaged ruins. This issue of identity and context, which are central to Khoury’s work as an architect, rail against forgetting a part of history that is intrinsic to Beirut. In a way, this tug between rapid development and the idealisation of the Western model is not dissimilar to the period of modernism in the country when Khoury’s father, Khalil Khouri, was practising architecture. This period, too, largely forgotten, brings to the fore the notion that Beirut’s built fabric was a hybrid of East and West in the form that modernist architecture in the country took, and not simply an aspiration towards being part of a universal international community.

Beginning his career in the 1950s, Khalil’s practice was driven by his social-oriented ideals, working on projects such as housing for refugees. With the outbreak of the Civil War in the 70s, the modernist architect shifted focus to furniture, creating designs for the Lebanese public that celebrated craftsmanship but were modernist in form, and then the European elite as trade and the market grew. Khouri’s legacy as an industrialist, designer and architect is deeply embedded and influenced by the political landscape of Lebanon and was the subject of a retrospective at the inaugural We Design Beirut earlier this year. Curated by the younger Khoury and his son, Teymour Khoury, All Things Must (‘nt) Pass was staged in the Interdesign Building, a Brutalist edifice designed by Khalil as a showroom for his furniture designs. This design exhibition and its investigation of political realities of place and their influence on design through the story of Khalil became the starting point for a conversation with his son about his practice, of the issue of context, identity and contemporary architecture.

As we begin to speak, Khoury uses the device of the exhibition/building to explain the contexts in which his father was practising, the decades when Lebanon was in the process of becoming its own nation. “I put the building and the history of the company in a context of economy and politics from the post-independence era to 30 years of the post-independence boom,” he says about the exhibition in conversation with STIR. Khoury paints an evocative picture of his father’s last-designed retail building, of which he keeps a wooden model in his home. Of his father’s influence on his architectural training, Khoury is far more candid, talking about how his father didn’t approve of him studying architecture, a scenario most architects will recognise well.

What becomes evident in conversation is that, to Khoury, thinking about architectures that are particularly lodged within their contexts and how they demonstrate and navigate these realities, ever “an architect of the present.” This is conspicuous in his projects, such as the one that is most often talked about to this day, B018, a nightclub in an industrial district designed on the land of a former Palestinian refugee camp. Through its design and the site it was situated on, Khoury wanted to keep the memories of the war alive, its form resembling a sunk tanker with a mechanical roof. To the author, this sunken architecture is most indicative of the architect’s deployment of ‘war architecture’. Another proposal for a contemporary art museum for which the studio lost the competition presents a similar dialogue with its landscape.

Asking, “How can we deserve Lebanon’s modern and contemporary arts? Are we and have we been attentive to the meanings, ideas, forms, temporalities, lines, volumes or colours made available to us by modern and contemporary art and artists in Lebanon?” (as stated on the architect’s website), the proposal instead envisioned “underground tentacles” that visitors would have to go down to access temporary installations and art exhibitions; a bold take on the often gate-kept environments of contemporary art patronage.

Not one to shy away from the effects of war, another design installation by Khoury at MAXXI similarly plumbed the idea of destruction, presenting “a prototype of a device in which a hypothetical tourist could be dropped to their death in the Fun Fair of the ruined city.” However, when asked to speak about his projects, Khoury begins with his graduate work, which he often uses to introduce his work. Evolving Scars was undertaken with Lebbeus Woods as a graduate project at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1991. Exploring the postwar rebuilding of Beirut, the speculative work proposed a two-storey hollowed-out structure clad in two layers of glass, with the building’s crushed remains sandwiched in between. Visitors to the site would be suspended in the middle, watching the glass layers fill with rubble. It was meant to be an architectural performance of destruction and eventual reconstruction, a theme that recurs constantly in Khoury’s work.

For him, then, this is the one way to create true meaning through architecture, confronting the realities of "toxic grounds" particular to Lebanon. “If you really start observing every plot, you understand in Beirut that every single plot could be explosive. You read this and you understand the complete bankruptcy of the state. Your project becomes political whether you like it or not,” as he tells STIR. For Khoury, there is “pleasure in [this] complexity.” Indeed, while the built environment in the Gulf continues to move away from context towards hyper-consumerist models that see architecture as providing technocratic solutions to the pervasive issues faced by the Anthropocene (caused by these very models of capitalism), this is what Khoury’s practice staunchly critiques through a political stance, moving away from an architecture that believes in its permanence.

Watch the full interview by clicking on the cover video.