A Lebanese Perspective

T H E

M A S T E R

A R C H I T E C T

S E R I E S

A Lebanese Perspective HOUSES AND OTHER WORK BY SIMONE KOSREMELLI Text by Sylvia Shorto

T H E

M A S T E R

A R C H I T E C T

S E R I E S

A Lebanese Perspective HOUSES AND OTHER WORK BY SIMONE KOSREMELLI Text by Sylvia Shorto

Published in Australia in 2011 by The Images Publishing Group Pty Ltd ABN 89 059 734 431 6 Bastow Place, Mulgrave, Victoria 3170, Australia Tel: +61 3 9561 5544 Fax: +61 3 9561 4860 books@imagespublishing.com www.imagespublishing.com

Contents

Copyright © The Images Publishing Group Pty Ltd 2011 The Images Publishing Group Reference Number: 1006 All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Author: Shorto, Sylvia.

Title: A lebanese perspective : houses and other work : Simone Kosremelli / Sylvia Shorto.

ISBN: 9781864704716 (hbk.)

Subjects: Kosremelli, Simone.

Architecture, Modern—Lebanon—Pictorial works.

Architectural drawing—Lebanon.

Dewey Number: 724 Production by The Graphic Image Studio Pty Ltd, Mulgrave, Australia www.tgis.com.au Pre-publishing services by United Graphic Pte Ltd, Singapore Printed on 150gsm Lumi Silk paper by Everbest Printing Co. Ltd., in Hong Kong/China IMAGES has included on its website a page for special notices in relation to this and its other publications. Please visit www.imagespublishing.com.

Foreword by M. Christine Boyer Introduction by Simone Kosremelli The Passage of Time: Tradition in Simone Kosremelli’s Houses

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Houses The Audi/Smith House Khalil Fattal House George Zeidan House Afif Khoury House Elias Baroudi House Julinda Abu Nasr (Mezzaluna) House Karami Palace Extension Habib Hachicho House Private Beach House Nezar Al Saie Villa Ahmad Al Sayegh Villa Nancy’s Farm Nada Boustani House Samir Boustani House Ziad Boulos House Raymond Juredini Chalet Faisal Alami Villa and Pool House Zaki Abou Taam Villa Rehabilitation Carl Bistany House | Karim Chehab House Kfertay 721 Abdallah Al Kuwaiz House Rehabilitation

24 32 38 44 46 54 58 60 64 66 74 78 86 94 98 106 112 120 126 132 140

Multi-Unit Dwellings Bechara Aoun Triple Chalets El Nimr and Munla Twin Houses Sultan Ben Essa Family House Justinian Street Residential Building

148 152 160 164

Commercial, Industrial and Public Buildings Les Créneaux Sports and Cultural Club Bank Audi D-Block Reconstruction Melrose Building Restoration Sarraf Headquarters Façade Renovations Cosmaline, Pharmaline, Aerosol Catrans Headquarters The Mtein Municipality

170 178 184 190 192 194 196

Interior Design Sami Khoury Residence Galerie Semaan Georges Khouri Apartment Ayad Nasser Duplex Michel Chahine Duplex Dar El Mamlouka Hotel Renovations

206 210 212 216 220 224

Competition Project The House of Arts and Culture

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Chronology of Works Biography Bibliography Acknowledgements

242 250 254 255

Foreword M. Christine Boyer William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Architecture and Director of Undergraduate Urban Studies at Princeton University

When civil war broke out in Lebanon, Simone Kosremelli was a student at Columbia University in New York City. She was pained by the turmoil enveloping her country, listening intently to news coming over her shortwave radio as the nation decayed into war.

It is not surprising that she returned to Lebanon after 1977 for Simone’s identity was carved in that country.

Her student years were also times of turmoil in New York City, as fiscal crisis dragged the city into near bankruptcy. Yet there was revival amidst the debris: the city’s cast-iron district of warehouses were being recycled into residential lofts for artists, the magnificent Grand Central Station was recognized by the Supreme Court as a historic treasure that could not be destroyed by a tall office tower springing from its inner court, the historic preservation movement was gaining national recognition. Did Simone learn the lesson of “creative destruction” from her New York experience? Is this why she understands that ruins, reconstruction, perhaps even war itself, are phases of capitalist development to destroy and to rebuild?

In times of war, catastrophic damage is always inflicted on architecture: façades are riddled with bullets, gaping holes stare out where doors and windows once stood, and whole city blocks lie about in ruins. Piles of rubble give witness to the violence endured by architecture. Architecture as a material thing stands in the way of disruptive violence. Ruins evoke the pathos of what has been lost, of what cannot be recuperated. But ruins also offer the opportunity to rebuild, to restore, and turn loss to gain.

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This book’s magnificent photographic images and carefully drawn plans and elevations offer us a compelling appraisal of Simone Kosremelli’s architectural work since 1981. One element above all stands out. Simone builds with stone; her architecture is clad in the stones of Lebanon, with pale limestone and the rich colours of sandstone making an intense harmony with nature, revealing the hand of the builder, the craft of cut stone.

Stone architecture may contradict the image of early modern architecture – the white cubic houses of Le Corbusier or the glass and steel skyscrapers of Mies van der Rohe. To the contrary, stone is opaque, heavy and powerful. It requires the craft of stonemasons and speaks of ancient traditions. It summons forth sensitivity to the making of place.

I like to think that the permanence of this earth-bound material, its very stoniness, in the work of Simone Kosremelli is a healing gesture for the wounds of war. There is power in the way natural stone is deployed, stability provided by stone, and pleasure offered in its many tonalities and differing grains. It calls forth the use of arches, lintels, vaults and pillars, to span spaces or transfer load.

The forward-looking gesture of stone the protector, marshals memory of tradition while simultaneously building new foundations of permanence. Building in stone becomes a metonym for the base on which a stable society stands.

Simone Kosremelli’s architecture of stone also reminds me of Le Corbusier’s exploration of the unique potential of stone. The land and its materials, he wrote, must be listened to: the desert speaks, the stone speaks, even trees speak. Stone was a friend of man.

“Stone speaks through the wall, the profile, the moulding, the base and the statue.”i It creates many different walls, with many beautiful textures. The cut of the stone reveals the life of the work.

restaurants alongside the eastern Mediterranean, visiting the apartments of clients, and going to fashionable night-time sites that were bringing back the celebratory life of the city she loved so much. Now in the collected images of this excellent monograph of Simone Kosremelli’s work, I anticipate with great poignancy viewing her architecture in situ, and hearing the stones that speak of place and tradition.

“The cut of the stone! What a beautiful word. To cut the stone with a chisel and hammer in the hand, what a beautiful gesture! It is worthy of some poignant terms.”ii Modern science had discharged stone of its old duty to carry weight.

Just as the automobile had put the horse to pasture, now stones sleep in fields, waiting to be awakened.

“We wake it up? Never to deprive us again of sunlight, of light, of the extended view that we have conquered.

But we wake it up in order that it once again is near us, in contact with our hands, the old faithful friend.”iii When I last visited Beirut in 1999, Simone knew her former professor would be there from a poster announcing the conference speakers. She had called my hotel before I arrived, a wonderful welcoming to the great city of Beirut. When I was not busy with conference affairs, Simone was a most generous and proud host of her city, driving me to see her architecture, taking me to fish

i Le Corbusier, “La Pierre, Amie de l’Homme,” October 23, 1937 FLC B1-15-174-185; quotation: 17 ii Le Corbusier, “La Pierre, Amie de l’Homme”: 181 iii Le Corbusier, “La Pierre, Amie de l’Homme”: 185

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Introduction

It is an emotional experience for any architect to look back at the work of a lifetime, rather like turning out one’s desk and finding old love letters, or photographs of an event long past, partly forgotten or misremembered, but still deeply moving. In this book I look back at more than 30 years of work, and at the evolution of my approach to architecture. I look in particular at my relationship to Lebanon’s traditional buildings. They are part of my identity, and for me, architecture and identity cannot be separated.

Mine is a small practice, and one that runs counter to many of the globalizing trends that are creating a new phase of anonymous international building of the kind that many of us hoped had long since been put behind us. My practice is modern, but it tries to operate locally and in harmony with the immediate environment, both physically and culturally. I work closely and in dialogue with my clients, and I supervise all the details of both process and product to create buildings in which you can still feel the hand of the builder.

I encourage the training of new generations of artisans, and together we work to re-establish skills that would otherwise be lost.

Some important personal experiences influenced my early architectural thinking. When I went to architecture school at the American University of Beirut, all our design courses were saturated with ideas from International Modernism, but we also cut our teeth on those early iconic figures, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Eero Saarinen, Alvar Aalto, for whom in a number of ways craft and context were still essential components of good design.

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Parallel to our design training, we took an intensive course in local regional surveying – a history course really – offered every summer by an Austrian architect, Friedrich Ragette. Students would go to a village in the mountains and draw by hand the plans and details of traditional Lebanese buildings. Ragette would go on to write an important book on Lebanese architecture.

The group I worked with did something slightly different.

We surveyed early-20th-century apartment houses in the Beirut suburb of Achrafieh, analysing the ways that changing building materials and social practices had gradually altered domestic plans.

Although this course was not taught as a potential tool for design, that was how I assimilated it. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it made an impression on me at a very deep level, and would have a great influence on the way I approached my future profession.

I had other, vivid encounters with Lebanese architecture. For example, I will never forget a visit to a 19th-century central hall house in Beirut lived in by my design teacher, the architect Assem Salaam.

It was a beautiful old house. Marvellous! I loved the simplicity and regularity of its windows, and the very high ceilings with their simple wooden beams. The house had recently been restored on the inside, but not in a way that changed its essential character. It was still very much alive, despite its age, and as an architect, I have always kept that particular quality of the Salaam house in the forefront of my mind.

In 1974, I went off to do graduate studies at Columbia University in New York. There, I finally saw famous examples of the International Style that I had been taught about, the Seagram Building, for example.

I had thought I would be in awe of famous Modernist buildings, but that was not to be the case. They were very interesting, and intellectually I knew that I was seeing architectural icons, but somehow they did not appeal to my particular aesthetics. It was in the older New York neighbourhoods, in the cast-iron district in Soho, or in streets lined with brownstone houses, that I felt a truer encounter with the city. The cast-iron district, once an industrial area, had recently become the home of New York’s artistic and intellectual scene. I particularly enjoyed visiting spaces that had been converted into lofts by artists and architects. What I liked most about these spaces was the surprise you would experience when, entering from a street façade on which you could read the passage of time, you would find yourself in a stunning contemporary interior.

While I was in New York I came across two books that set me thinking along a parallel track to the ways of making buildings that I had been taught. One, Architecture Without Architects by Bernard Rudofsky, had been published at the time of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1964, and drew attention to the spontaneous evolution of vernacular houses in different parts of the world. The other was Hassan Fathy’s revolutionary book, Architecture for the Poor, a symbol of the Seventies. Fathy was linking his work directly to everyday social practices and proposing

a conscious, designed revival of the vernacular architecture of the Egyptian countryside. Outside the established architectural profession, with its star architects, here was a parallel universe, apparently with no stars at all. Fathy was offering new ways to think about making good, relevant and place-specific buildings.

In 1975, on my way from New York for a visit to Lebanon, I went to Spain and Morocco to see their architectural treasures. For the first time, I really understood the meaning of architecture without architects. Here were places heavily charged with history, places where you could feel the weight of many rich traditions, places built with local materials, places that naturally, spontaneously and with good reasons, took the climate into account in their building.

Here were places that had not lost their sense of place.

But there was more. Old structures and neighbourhoods were being saved and transformed for contemporary use. In Cuenca, once an isolated village linked to the rest of the world by a fragile and removable pedestrian pass, there was now a Museum of Abstract Art in the Casas Colgadas, a cluster of late-medieval houses perched precariously on the cliff top. Here was both intelligent and appropriate re-use of old buildings.

But my epiphany came when I visited the Alhambra in Granada.

The anonymity of the palace’s external skin, and its physical integration into the surrounding environment, belied the surprise

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discovery of interiors of an unparalleled complexity and richness.

I felt an architectural shiver. Internal and external spaces were here in a complex dialogue charged with the many meanings of history and of place. For me, it was an architectural pleasure that has never been matched.

country villages. I saw a way to perpetuate a wonderful tradition by making new buildings that were linked to the vocabulary of the past. There could also, I believed, be a revival of craftsmanship, which might encourage interest in an authentic continuity: a modern growth of vernacular traditions.

In 1978 I returned to Lebanon for good, after an absence of more than three years, and I started my own practice in 1981. The long Civil War was already beginning to take a toll on the built environment. The traditional Lebanese house, which once punctuated the urban spaces of Beirut, was now being destroyed, directly or indirectly, by the war and its effects. I was made aware, as I watched the destruction, of the enormous aesthetic and social value of such houses. This pushed me to begin to get better acquainted with the Lebanese vernacular in both rural and urban contexts.

So how has that background influenced my kind of architecture?

Although my training was steeped in International Modernism, my work is not about architecture with a big A. It is about low-key, locally integrated building, an architecture that grows from a place and belongs to that place. It is not a copy of the Lebanese vernacular, but rather a reinterpretation of its component parts. I use its basic volumetric vocabulary, adapting it for the present. I think of it as if I were playing an underlying classical leitmotif with jazzy variations.

No two Lebanese houses are really the same, but there are basic components that are recurrent: simple volumes, red-tiled roofs, regular courses of stone, arcaded openings within the main rooms, rectangular openings for the secondary spaces, external staircases, and breezy loggias. I began to take elements of this vocabulary and use them for the design of my houses. It was too late to save the architectural heritage of Beirut: the time had long since passed when the State might have intervened to list and to protect the best of the city’s old houses and apartment buildings. But the old buildings that are fast disappearing from Beirut’s streetscapes still exist in

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I also restore buildings – I like to use the word ‘rehabilitate’ – bringing them to the functional standards of the 21st century.

Sometimes, the buildings I create from scratch are thought to be restoration works. Some architects would take this as an insult.

For me, it is the best compliment I could wish for.

The relationship of architecture to local identity is central to the meaning of my professional practice. The simple volumes of the traditional Lebanese house, so practical yet at the same time so resonant, fit their environment perfectly in the past. Today, a continuing responsibility for that environment is part of an

architect’s obligation. Architecture of course has a cultural dimension. It is interwoven with both its physical and its social milieus. In producing architecture in Lebanon, I feel closeness to and a kinship with the Mediterranean as well as to the local architectural heritage. And when I build outside Lebanon, as I sometimes do, I try to respect different local cultures, materials and traditions for the same reasons.

Cultural traditions stay alive only if they continually create themselves anew. Vernacular architecture was built by artisans – stonecutters, masons, joiners and carpenters. A team worked together to produce the anonymous masterpieces of the past. Today, I work very closely with artisans, and the information we exchange is always mutually enriching. When restoration of the war-ravaged Audi Plaza Block-D was finished, one of the masons brought me a mirror and showed me, in its reflection, the half-hidden signature that of one of the original masons had carved behind a column base. To my great surprise and joy, he had added his own signature, as well as my firm’s logo. It was a gesture that both sealed and recorded for posterity our respect for each other, for our forebears, and for our continuation of tradition.

Simone Kosremelli

Introduction

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The Passage of Time: Tradition in Simone Kosremelli’s Houses Sylvia Shorto Associate Professor Department of Architecture and Design American University of Beirut 1

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“I like to sense the passage of time in people and in things.

Grey hair, old clothes that feel comfortable. These are things that have value.”i Simone Kosremelli does not like mediocrity and she really does not like excess. A direct and very determined woman, she will tell you this without pulling any punches as soon as you start to talk with her about the houses she designs. Kosremelli, who has had her own practice in Beirut for 30 years now, has achieved a degree of precision in both the design and the execution of these houses that puts others in the shade. Houses have been the mainstay of her practice.

Her designs are based on simple volumes. Some have elements that protrude or project and add to the basic volume on its exterior.

Others fit all the complexities of their plan neatly inside a single volume, like an architectural Rubik’s cube. Each one is quite distinct, yet each contains links to the others. And they all maintain a close connection to the layers of Lebanon’s past.

Kosremelli has always had a passionate interest in what it means to be Lebanese, and in what being Arab means as a part of Eastern Mediterranean culture. More than anything else, the rich vernacular past of her country has inspired her repertoire of design ideas. [1] Recurrent motifs include the mixing together of flat and hipped roofs; high, sometimes vaulted principal rooms based on the liwan; carefully framed vistas; corbelled balconies; stairs that turn over a quarter arch; and plain, rusticated stone façades. [2] Many of the elements that inspire her she has borrowed directly from tradition.

Sometimes the references are veiled, and more often than not they are 12

transformed. [3] Kosremelli also – literally – incorporates into her houses small pieces of that tradition salvaged from old buildings: their cast-iron railings; cantilevered stone steps; mandaloun windows and occuli; and cemento tiles, which she lays into the floor like rare carpets. [4 and 5] These are details that unleash countless memories, yet they are used in houses that are wholly contemporary. The result – houses that fit comfortably into both the terrain and its history, accommodating themselves to both.

But how do you create a contemporary architecture that links to the vernacular without sliding backwards into the sticky trap of nostalgia? In assembling a working repertoire of ideas that reference Lebanon’s past, Kosremelli has always been acutely conscious of “appropriateness” and she has always had a horror of kitsch. All around her, extravagant pastiches of the vernacular are now being built. Tyrolean or Swiss-derived houses dot the Lebanese mountains, using every possible reference: extra dormers, hips, turrets and arches, in many different kinds of stone, all thrown together into the architectural blender. No less inappropriate are the repetitious new colonnades copied from the Umayyad city of ‘Anjar or visual references to Roman Baalbek that have begun to appear on public buildings or, perhaps even worse, on houses, a detailing that lacks equilibrium and scale. This is what Kosremelli resists, the ugly and the pompous. She prides herself on building low-key houses.

Kosremelli stands apart as being the first, and for many years the only, woman in Lebanon with her own architectural practice. From the age of 15 it was clear in her mind that she would be an architect.

French-educated and clever at mathematics and at drawing, she studied for two years in Beirut’s Grand Lycée where the training prepared pupils to compete for entry to the Ecole Supérieure des Ingénieurs. In 1969, she was admitted instead to the Department of Architecture at the American University of Beirut (AUB), only the second woman to be given a place in that programme. One of her professors, the architect Assem Salaam in whose office she was a student intern, remembers her as “a very bright student, one of the most talented”.ii And in her practice now, he believes, she is the architect most consciously involved in trying to define a Lebanese identity.

After graduating with distinction from AUB, Kosremelli was awarded a coveted Fulbright Fellowship, enabling her to continue her studies at Columbia University in New York. She completed the degree of Master in Urbanism in 1977. At Columbia she was exposed to the work of the Italian-born Philadelphia architect Romaldo Giurgola.

Giurgola, who had worked in Louis Kahn’s office, had a great sensitivity to the local, regarding every architectural project as a fragment of its immediate surroundings. For Giurgola, the task of architecture was simple: to make a better life. Kosremelli admired him for this humanistic approach, and for the way he gave value to context. At Columbia, she also absorbed Kenneth Frampton’s emerging ideas on critical regionalism. She returned to Beirut, beginning her own practice in 1981, in the middle of the long Civil War (1975–1990). The war would mark her career in many ways, none less important than in increasing her resolve to follow projects through, from concept to completion, often under difficult

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circumstances. It did not deter her. At one time, she had two offices, one in East Beirut, the other in West; and for convenience she kept a car on either side of the Green Line.

An architect must work on both sides of her brain, as well. Kosremelli developed both design skills and business acumen, even running her own construction company for a time so that she could be sure of quality in her workmen. Hers is a small and vibrant practice, built alone, without partners. She works locally, in Lebanon and sometimes in Syria or in the Arab Gulf, always in harmony with immediate physical and cultural contexts. She also works very closely with her clients, providing individual attention to the details of their requirements. The end result is always a place in which people feel they belong, a house in which they can take pleasure in living. “I give my full self to all of my projects,” Kosremelli will tell you. “And I cannot tell you the joy I have when my clients say they are happy with the results.”

Kosremelli doesn’t just build houses, but it is her houses that best demonstrate her commitment to continuing the traditions of Lebanese and regional building. Her architectural education in early 1970s Beirut had been in international Brutalist methods and her earliest houses reflected this. Her first built projects, the Saba Nader Chalet, Faqra (1979, Chronology entry 1) and the double Khouri Houses in Baabdat (1982, Chronology entry 2), still mimic the ways she was taught to use concrete. But the Khouri Houses were also her first tentative attempt to work using the cubic volumes of Lebanese tradition. She also used the hipped tile roof. The two linked houses 13

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were suggested by a local typology, conjoined apartment blocks with a common central stairway, known as wikala. The duplication of volumes would become part of her evolving architectural vocabulary, leading to single and multiple-unit dwellings in inventive volumetric combinations; perhaps the most notable being the house for the George Zeidan family (1993, page 38, Chronology entry 9).

With the Audi/Smith House in Faqra (1984, page 24, Chronology entry 3) Kosremelli broke free from the constraints of her formal education, designing a house with a triangular plan determined by the topography of its site, and incorporating locally available building materials. Here, for the first time, she used stone quarried on site, and for the first time experimented with the arch. Later, she would recall the experience of watching the masons’ almost magical skill in preparing the stone: “The way of cutting it was very beautiful.

It is not really cutting, it’s ‘moving apart’ so that the stone will break open. The masons hit the stone in three places, and it almost opens up by itself. Amazing! And when you open the stone this way, you will have the interior part of the stone to use for the exterior of the house, and the colour and texture of the house will look the same as the stone in the landscape in 50 or so years, a very beautiful greyish colour.”iii The house was widely acclaimed for its originality.

Kosremelli was seen to be developing an architectural language independent of modernist fashion, an architecture that reflected the identity of the country, and one that had the possibility of developing into a contemporary regional Lebanese architecture. This house would launch her career.

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The Fattal House (1986, page 32, Chronology entry 4), also in Faqra, helped consolidate her ideas. High in the Lebanese mountains, Faqra was then a new ski resort development, with a Swiss master plan that determined that all its houses should be of fair-faced concrete with steeply pitched gabled roofs to keep the snow from accumulating. Breaking with this ordinance, Kosremelli reverted to the four-sided hipped roof common to many late-19th century Lebanese mountain houses. She tucked the house into the natural terrain, and she clad it with locally quarried stone. [6] She began, too, a continuing exploration of the relationship between the inside and the outside of a house. Having been taught that the façade must always express the interior, she was now discovering the limitations of this rule. A functional, modern interior, which was what her client required, one with vitality and flexibility, could and probably should be considered separately from an exterior that was designed to echo historical and natural contexts. It was by keeping the interior separate from the exterior that Kosremelli has been able to continue to reference Lebanon’s past without sacrificing convenience and comfort, over a period of more than 30 years. Working in this way, she has also been able to perfect another major characteristic of her houses – the element of surprise one feels when discovering a stunning modern interior inside an apparently traditional shell. *** There is the self-referential quality of an artist in Simone Kosremelli’s houses, with each project containing explorations of one developed

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before it, in a sometimes-circuitous architectural procession.

Kosremelli does not simply copy – far from it. But the common denominator in her work is that she refers to Lebanon when she builds in Lebanon.iv In an increasingly global age, hers is still a very local architecture, and so it needs to be assessed in local contexts: vernacular tradition; the transmission to Lebanon of modernism and local responses to modernism; and the current debates in Lebanon on the meaning of preserving the past.

Lebanon is a country of great beauty. [7] It is also a country of contrasts, but perhaps none is as striking as the one between the intensity and pace of its largest city, Beirut, and the tranquillity of life in its villages. Village life is revered by all but the most jaded city dweller, while the ownership of agricultural land has a value that is qualitatively different from the value attached to urban real estate. Land in Lebanon means much more than money. The villages that were born of this land used a common spatial language that cut across religious groups and political ruptures. They evolved to meet both social and environmental conditions in the three geographically distinct regions of the country – the Beqa’a valley, the mountains and the coastal plain. Harmonious ensembles of buildings, they were characterised by an inherent modesty and human scale. The architectural historian Friedrich Ragette has noted that there are surprisingly few marks of distinction on important buildings within villages, with palaces, or churches and mosques, typified rather as “firsts among equals”.v

Considering the number of different civilisations that have arrived and settled in Lebanon over more than 7,000 years, its vernacular building shows relatively little outside influence. There was once a strong local Roman presence, but very little of the formally classical was transmitted, either then or in later centuries. Buildings were determined not by the conventionalised external rules of architects, but rather by ways of life and by available materials. Lebanon’s relationship with other Mediterranean cultures – the seafaring Venetian state, or the Florentine republic – was surprisingly limited, as was Ottoman Turkish influence, perhaps because of the laissez faire way that empire administered its provinces. So Lebanese vernacular architecture was able to evolve to suit its own time and place.

Small and serviceable village houses were built of mud brick or, more often, of double stone walls with a mud and rubble core. [8] Winters in the mountain are cold. Grouped in sheltered corners of the landscape, the simple cube or parallelepiped houses were topped by a flat turf roof. [9 and 10] Later, depending on the region, hipped red-tiled roofs became common and houses more symmetrically formal: tiles were imported from Marseilles from mid 19th century.

[11] Groin-vaulted ground floors provided a strongly built defence against earthquakes. Locally available stone was used: sandstone in a range of creams, yellows and browns; white limestone, sometimes with green-grey or blue streaks; and occasionally dark grey basalt.

The different stone types were sometimes bedded close together, and sometimes used for the same house. Quarried stone seldom exceeded 50 centimetres in length.vi

The Passage of Time

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Although Lebanon’s material record is one of the oldest on earth, dating to the Neolithic period, Beirut’s modern history begins in the late 19th century, its layers from the pre-Roman through the early Ottoman periods now almost entirely hidden beneath the ground.

The houses of Beirut’s 19th-century bourgeoisie, some of which still perilously cling to life in the developing city, were commonly built as two discrete and self-contained floor-through apartments, with separate external entrances to ground and first floors. [12] Their main façades were generally symmetrical and often incorporated at their centre a triple pointed arch. Inside, a large, formal central hall had an anteroom at each end and lateral rooms that opened directly onto it. With changes in available materials in the French Mandate period – the introduction of concrete in the 1920s and its local manufacture from the 1930s – this tradition grew into four-storey family apartment buildings; and later, from the 1950s, into buildings of up to six floors, now with an elevator. vii Plans changed slowly, as local social conventions changed, but modernism had now found its place in Beirut.

With few exceptions, Lebanon has been omitted from the wider study of regional modernism, and it is not present in the recently emerging discourse on the influence of Mediterranean vernacular traditions on architects from northern Europe. As in this discourse, we need to think about the value of the Lebanese vernacular, about whether it is the local modernism’s ‘other’ or the foundation on which it rests.viii What was the role of early modern architecture in Lebanon? It was initially an introduced style, to be sure. If it was socially driven, it was

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not by a reaction against the ills of industrialisation, but rather by the definition of an independent identity at the end of the French mandate. The move towards Lebanese independence and the international rise of modernism happened at the same time.

Introduced, and yet quickly following a trajectory and a set of rhythms of its own, it adapted to the specificities of its environment, rather than mimicking developments in the West. Lebanese architects in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, in different ways, struggled in their work to fit what they had learned in schools abroad (or in local schools founded on foreign models) to local climate, social practices and pre-existing building traditions. Not the least of these was a long and informal history of buildings designed by the craftsmen who physically made them. With the economic boom in Lebanon after independence, and especially in the 1960s, an increase in construction also brought a number of foreign architects to practice in the country, but by then a locally inflected modernism was well established.

The history of modernism in Lebanon is one of dualities. It has been argued that many of the architects practicing did not look back at tradition.ix But many were deeply rooted in and influenced by their own traditions, and by the late 1950s were confidently incorporating expressions of local character in their work. Cambridge-trained Assem Salaam (b. 1924), who worked in England before returning to Beirut, has sustained links with the past for more than 50 years of practice through the use of local materials combined with modern plans.x For his own house Salaam would choose a graceful Ottoman-period mansion with high wooden ceilings, carefully

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modernised on the inside. Pierre El-Khoury (1930–2005) returned to Lebanon after training in Paris in the mid 1950s, and acquired experience by observing local vernacular building. This resulted, especially in his houses, in links through materials if not formal references.xi His ethereal Villa Aboukheir (1964) used floating sheets of local stone, and its interior was derived from the everyday living practices of the client. Salaam and El-Khoury represented Lebanon abroad in the 1960s, designing the pavilion for the New York World’s Fair (1964). This consisted of a succession of cube-like structures of staggered heights grouped around an enclosed court, with a tower at its centre, and walls faced with imported sandstone.xii [13] It resembled nothing as much as “the arrangement of houses in the tiny villages that dot the mountain slopes where the cedars of Lebanon grow”.xiii El-Khoury would later restore the palace of Emir Amin near Beiteddine (1970), organising rooms off its three courtyards for use as a five-star hotel. [14] His Bel Horizon Village in Adma (1985) was a high-income, high-density residential development of single family houses with hipped roofs, grouped into blocks of three and built of site-excavated stone. These architects, in both of whose offices Simone Kosremelli had worked briefly as a young woman, were attempting to create a modern idiom that maintained links with the local and regional past through the use of borrowed elements. xiv Awareness of the importance of the local gradually found its way into the Lebanese architecture programs that were created after the departure of the French. Jacques Liger-Belair (b. 1933), a Belgian-born architect living and working in Beirut, taught a class that explored the

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synthesis of fair-faced concrete construction with vernacular-derived spaces. Assem Salaam and others formed a collaborative non-profit organisation to try to save historic buildings in 1960, L’Association pour la Protection des Sites et Anciennes Demeures au Liban (APSAD).

Liger-Belair conducted a study of building in the Lebanese countryside, and he contributed a publication, L’Habitation au Liban published by APSAD in 1966, the first of its kind. [15] His work was followed by that of Friedrich Ragette, whose AUB course in surveying regional buildings resulted in a book that incorporated detailed student drawings, Architecture in Lebanon (1974).xv These publications were influential in the dissemination of vernacular styles, but one consequence, it has been argued, was an unfortunate drift towards façade-ism that served both to clutter and obscure structural modernism.xvi The reduction of traditional building to a series of drawings made it possible for architectural firms to simply copy motifs, and to ignore the human practices that led to their creation in the first place. The re-contextualisation associated with postmodernism would now come quickly and naturally to Lebanon.

APSAD’s activities were paralysed during the Civil War, but resumed in Beirut in 1995, if somewhat less influentially. Today, many old houses that survived the war are being wantonly altered or demolished because of reconstruction. Of about 1,200 buildings that were inventoried for listing in the mid 1990s by the Lebanese Ministry of Culture, fewer than 400 are still standing. In Ain Mreisse, where Simone Kosremelli’s office is located, the recent devastation has been horrifying and irrevocable. A sound old building with a

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Bernard Khoury/DW5

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fine stone staircase, the inspiration for several of her quarter-arched entrances, was being bulldozed as this essay was being written. [16] Contemporary architects of the generation that trained after Kosremelli create different types of continuities with the Lebanese past. These often come in sharply ironic and reactionary form, sometimes with reference to the tense ambivalence with which most developers greet any attempt at legislating for historic preservation.

The work of Bernard Khoury, for example, a Rhode Island School of Design-trained architect, pulsates with references to unresolved postwar conflict, and displays its own ambivalence to the past.

His Centrale (2001) has been described as dangling half way between conservation and critique.xvii [17] To create a restaurant, Khoury encased the hollow shell of a derelict, war-damaged and listed Beirut house in a metallic mesh grid that would catch decaying pieces of its sandstone façade as they fell off.xviii He completely gutted the inside of the building, creating a raw industrial space with an arched, mechanised ceiling like a giant eyelid, from which patrons could look out over their city, all the while being reconstructed at the expense of memory. *** This is the historical background against which Simone Kosremelli’s practice needs to be considered if we are to try and make a critical assessment of it. Contrasting her work with that of the younger Khoury, for example, it is evident first and foremost that its aim is to

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fit in, rather than stand out or offer a challenge. Her work is discreet and it is measured, somehow balancing the constantly shifting dualities between the regional present and the past. Because Lebanese regionalism has so far been excluded from the architectural canon, and is not yet linked to other regional architecture at any meaningful level, the work can still only be locally assessed. Despite the advent of globalisation, the illusion still persists that European culture is, in Paul Ricoeur’s definition, the “universal civilization”.xix In a postindustrial age, this of course can no longer be true, but to incorporate a new regional architecture into written histories on terms that are not merely subaltern is a complex task still to be undertaken.

There have been criticisms if not critiques of Kosremelli’s practice, the most frequent being that she is not involved in the wider aspects of the profession – in campaigning for preservation legislation, for example – and that she is detached from civil society, appreciative of the values it represents, but doing nothing to contribute. Kosremelli would counter such criticism in a characteristically practical way, by showing (not by saying) how she has given life to Lebanese identity through her efforts to revive craftsmanship and give meaning to the making of architecture. She builds in stone, and people who work the stone are now hard to find. Her encouragement and the patronage of her clients have helped with this revival.

Re-assessing the roles that have been played by craftsmen/builders in architectural progress is one way to begin to consider the wider relevance of Kosremelli’s work. Early in her career, she drew on the

logic of how old houses were built, particularly in their use of stone, and she developed a great admiration for the craft of the mason.

“Masons 200 years ago used stone properly”, she says. “I wish I had lived then, to understand better”.xx Like Le Corbusier, she bemoans the fact that we live in an age lacking in scrupulous craftsmen.xxi In Lebanon the traditions of carpenters and masons – which had already been subject to change because of the adoption of new building materials, began to die out completely between the 1940s and 50s. Their products were now mimicked in reinforced concrete.

Cast concrete corbels supporting verandahs, for example, replaced those in carved stone that had once supported moucharabieh windows. [18] Designers need craftsmen. They envisage what they want to build, but design on paper, or even using finished models as Kosremelli does, always falls short of expressing the designer’s full intention.

Designers rely on craftsmen, whose good workmanship improves on design. And designers can only exist by exploiting what workmen have already perfected. It is the craftsman who found ways to smooth and polish surfaces so that designers might have the option of specifying ashlar instead of rough lumps of stone. It is craftsmen who turn raw material into usable material. Craftsmen and designers together need to wisely select what has been made into the best available material if they want their end results to last.

The framework that we inevitably use when thinking about craftsmanship is a flawed one. It buys into the hard and fast

distinction between building that has been designed (“architecture”) and that has spontaneously evolved (“vernacular building”).

Architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner cemented this distinction in his seminal book, Pioneers of Modern Design (1936) when he tried to introduce an alternative context for the 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement. In doing this, he limited the importance of the role of the vernacular in later Western modernism.xxii But modernism, even the modernism of Le Corbusier, ultimately grew out of this tradition. Corbu received his early education in a regional Arts and Crafts school in Switzerland. When he made his famous youthful Journey to the East in 1911, he was an outsider seeking the “unspoilt” vernacular of other peoples, already felt to be lost in Europe, and he summed up the process of its formation: “... [T]hese houses are not the work of a certain Mr X. They are the creation of the distant past, often dating back through many ages. In the beginning, someone who was more of a poet than others in the crowd gave expression to the idea; it made an impact. It was taken up. It was worked on, corrected, perfected to the level of human resources and emotions. It was polished. In order that it could be handed on, it was essential that its intentions were clear. It was clarified.

It was confirmed ever more definitely in a meaning that became unanimous and thereby transmissible. At last it became the perfect mirror of its people ...”xxiii

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Corbu’s early assimilation of the significance of the vernacular later showed itself in an overt way: the Villa Mandrot (1929–33), clad in stone, was a turning point in his mid career.

In a study of the relationship between design and workmanship, furniture maker David Pye has also argued that a false dichotomy was set up by the early champions of the Arts and Crafts style. This had the long-term effect of creating a skewed perception of the true role of the machine in making things, as well as an unrealistic and romantic prejudice in favour of the handmade, that relegated it to a nostalgic past. xxiv In offering alternative ways of thinking about meaning in making, Pye has argued that handicraft and handmade are sociohistorical terms not technical ones, because machinery and ways of standardising, jigging or making multiples have existed for millennia.

Most workmanship now utilises what Pye calls the workmanship of certainty, usually but by no means always industrial mass production, some products of which are well crafted and some not. He opposes this to the workmanship of risk. Thus thinking about the changing traditions of workmanship, from hand work to mass production, in shaping the built environment is conceptually false. Architecture, however made, is more than 90 percent workmanship of certainty.

You must be able to judge the outcome. You need tools and technology.

Kosremelli’s architecture when viewed on this axis is suddenly not at all backward looking or nostalgic. She does not oppose new technologies, but rather embraces the best that is offered in both the

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products of certainty and risk. The local can thus continue as a viable option for production, resulting in an intimate architecture produced by both architect and artisans, stemming from a dialogue with the patron and continuing that dialogue with location: the place for which it was made. Place taken in the broadest context, to include site, region and also a contemporary way of life.

Simone Kosremelli’s architecture is rooted in Lebanon, her country, and in a very real sense, she builds herself into her houses. But she builds not simply a shallow representation or a visual signifier of an imagined past. One of her most recently completed projects, designed almost 30 years after she began her practice, shows her continued inventiveness with traditional form. In the Said Daher Chalet in Faqra (2011, Catalogue entry 56), a spacious modern weekend home for a young professional couple and their three children, the idea of the red-roofed cube has been turned on its ear.

[19] The house still echoes its past, but it is roofed in handsome grey slate, an effect that is striking in the mountain mist. One hip of the roof has been completely replaced with glass. This dramatic gesture allows an expansive view of the sky, and gives a wonderful quality of light to the main room in both winter and in summer.

This is an architecture that speaks in a contemporary voice to its own roots, and never once loses sight of them. It is a living continuation of tradition.

i Author’s interview with Simone Kosremelli, May, 2011 ii Author’s interview with Assem Salaam, April 2011 iii Transcript of Simone Kosremelli’s television interviews on the Audi/Smith and Boustani houses iv This also applies to the Gulf, or to Syria, when she builds there. v Freidrich Ragette, Architecture in Lebanon: The Lebanese House during the 18th and 19th Centuries, American University of Beirut Press, 1974, p. 182 vi The Roman quarries at Baalbek are the notable exception to this statement, having the largest stones ever found. vii Robert Saliba: Beirut 1920–1940: Domestic Architecture Between Tradition and Modernity, Beirut: Order of Engineers and Architects, 1998 viii See Barry Bergdoll’s thoughtful foreword to Jean-Franc�ois Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino, eds.: Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities, London & New York: Routledge, 2010, p. xviii. The essays in this book explore the involvement of Modernist architects from northern Europe with the Mediterranean vernacular from the 1920s to the 1960s. xi George Arbid: “Practicing Modernism in Beirut: Architecture in Lebanon, 1946–1970”. Doctor of Design thesis, Harvard University, 2002 x Arbid, op. cit., p. 9. Salaam’s investigations have not stopped. In a recent project, Dar Takieddine in Baaqline (2007), a group of palace buildings built over several centuries was restored and given an extension of different cellular units that referring to the older buildings but were distinguished by a different coloured stone. xi Arbid, op. cit., p. 11 xii http://www.worldsfairphotos.com/nywf64/lebanon.htm xiii Ibid.

xiv The ideas of the noted Iraqi architect Rifat Chadirji were also influential. Of his own practice, Chadirji wrote, “I set out to learn from traditional architecture and to achieve a synthesis between traditional forms and the inevitable advent of modern technology.

My aim was to create an architecture which at once acknowledges the place in which it is built, yet which sacrifices nothing to modern technical capability.” xv Kosremelli had been one of Ragette’s students. See her introduction to this volume. xvi Marwan Ghandour, “The Politics of Traditional Contemporary Buildings”, Proceedings of the 2001 Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture International Conference Proceedings, Oriental-Occidental: Geography, Identity, Space, June 15–19, 2001 (Washington: ACSA Press, 2002), pp. 45–49 xvii Nicolai Ouroussoff, New York Times Magazine, May 21, 2006 xviii Khoury explains that the mesh enhances the poetic dimension of decay and the position of the intervention vis-à-vis the ‘historical value’ of the building. xix Paul Ricoeur “Universal Civilization and National Cultures”, originally published in History and Truth (Northwestern University Press, 1965) pp. 271–84 xx Author’s interview with Simone Kosremelli, May, 2011 xxi Le Corbusier, Journey to the East, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987 p. 195 xxii Lejeune and Sabatino, op. cit., p. 3 xxiii Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987, p. 33 xxiv David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship, Cambridge University Press, 1968

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HOUSES

Private houses that fit harmoniously into their immediate surroundings – in the mountains, in the city, or on the beach – have been the mainstay of Simone Kosremelli’s architectural practice. Her houses are based on a series of material, spatial and proportional values developed over the years. Sometimes their functional interiors are fitted into a neatly confining exterior volume.

Sometimes elements break the symmetry of the basic shape with imaginative projections and varied roof plans. Each house is distinct, but each contains links to the others. The common denominator is their relationship to the local domestic vocabulary. Whether she is designing in Lebanon, or for clients in the Gulf States, local references are assimilated, acknowledged and then transformed to suit the modern lives of her clients.

The Audi/Smith House Faqra (1984–1989)

In building the Audi/Smith House, there were important aims to be fulfilled: to respect the environment; to be both sensitive to tradition and architecturally inventive; and to satisfy the client’s needs for a comfortable, year-round weekend house. Faqra, where the house is located, is both a ski station during the winter season and a pleasant holiday resort in summer.

The site for the residence is a triangular plot of land that contains three low hills, some beautiful rocky outcrops and several wild trees.

In keeping with the project’s aim of conserving the environment, most of the wild trees were kept, including one particularly beautiful native oak with 13 trunks. The contours of the land were also preserved, and they suggested the double triangle shape for the three-bedroom house. Stone excavated from between the hills was used as rough, irregular facing on the façades. Eventually this stone facing will gently erode and will blend even more into the surrounding landscape.

To emphasise the close relationship between the house and its immediate environment, all its accesses are related in some way to a striking feature of the terrain. Thus the garage entrance is literally carved into the rock, with its interior walls faced in stone treated identically to the exterior façades. The garage is used as the main entrance in winter.

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The steps of the main exterior staircase emerge from a rocky formation and arch over a service entrance, concealing it from street view. The steps are gradually inclined, and on the first landing there is a bench made of natural stone. A second service access from the garage to the lower level of the garden is concealed behind another of the outcrops. On the upper level, there is direct access from the living room to the top of the hill, where steps carved into the ground lead down to the intermediate level of the garden, along a row of wild oaks. From the master bedroom balcony there are steps down to the spectacular tree with 13 trunks.

In its most basic form, the traditional Lebanese house consists of a stone cube topped by a pyramidal red-tiled roof. The main façade is symmetrical. In the Audi/Smith House, the inherent characteristics of the terrain caused the distortion of the traditional square plan into a composite triangle with long, asymmetrical façades.

To counterbalance this effect, some of the most common elements of the vernacular were retained: the tiled roof, now a tetrahedron, and the wrought-iron balustrades and louvered wooden shutters that accentuate the three façades.

The Audi/Smith house was acclaimed when it was built as an ‘architecture-in-the-making that reflects the identity of the country,’ with the potential of engendering an authentic contemporary Lebanese architecture.

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Khalil Fattal House Faqra (1986–1995)

The design of the Fattal House, a second home in the mountains of Faqra, was begun at the same time the Audi/Smith House (1984, page 24, Chronology entry 3) was being completed. It consolidates some of the concepts Kosremelli began to work with during the latter project. Sitting squarely and solidly on its site, this house draws more directly on the volumes of the traditional Lebanese vernacular than its triangular predecessor, and it marks the beginning of the architect’s exploration of how to create an intricate interior within what appears to be a simple cube or parallelepiped. The house is a compact rectangle that uses the available local material – the hard, pale greenish-grey Faqra stone – with a mixed vocabulary of arched and rectangular openings, and a tiled roof. The approach was to emulate the volume, the external materials and some details of the traditional Lebanese house, but to combine them with a freer façade treatment and a flexible interior – functional yet comfortable.

The two-storey house sits on a platform built into the rise of the site, and is oriented to the southwest, overlooking a sloping garden.

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The main entry is through a powerful deep archway surmounted by broad stone steps that lead to the roof. An arched window draws the visitor through to the ground-floor living and dining rooms.

These in turn give on to a cross-vaulted, double-height open loggia that wraps around the west corner of the building. The loggia, used for casual outdoor dining, references typical Lebanese mountain architecture (Chronology entry 51). At the same time, it transforms two façades into a playful asymmetry. To the east of the house are a roomy tiled kitchen and the service spaces. On the first floor, bedrooms line an asymmetrical central gallery, its void reaching up to the apex of the roof. The master bedroom has fine views from curved and corbelled planted balconies to the southeast and the southwest. The basement floor contains a separate guest apartment, accessible from the kitchen.

Limestone is abundant in the Lebanese landscape, and the almost self-evidently domestic form of this house both complements and contrasts with its wonderfully craggy surroundings.

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