Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron have designed what is likely to be the most visually arresting addition to Beirut’s skyline since the Holiday Inn. “A building is a building,” Jacques Herzog told Bespoke, “It cannot be read like a book; it doesn’t have any credits, subtitles or labels like a picture in a gallery. In that sense, we are absolutely anti-representational. The strength of our buildings is the immediate, visceral impact they have on a visitor.”
The 116-metre tall residential tower called Beirut Terraces is due to open in 2013 just behind the cluster of towers that loom over the city’s marina. Composed of a gravity-defying series of not-quite overlapping floor slabs, it’s a veritable mille-feuille of a building.
The irregular plates, each configured in one of five different ways to add further interest to apartments, balance precariously, their corners apparently held up by impossibly slender columns. Though it looks like it might sway in a stiff breeze, this airy stack of apartments is quite solid and its differently-sized vertical layers create overhangs and openings at different points along its façade, which are neatly filled with trees and hanging landscaped gardens, courtesy of Lebanon’s own Capability Brown, Vladimir Djurovic.
The planting of the layers - which conceptually are meant to echo the many-layered city, where thousands of years of civilisations lie one atop the other - are a deliberate attempt to side-line the glassed-in balconies created by air-conditioning in favour of liveable outdoor spaces that, like the buildings that once filled Beirut, make a virtue of the city’s Mediterranean climate.
Apartments are (naturally) glass-walled but careful orientation and strategic planting ensures that inhabitants are screened not only from the sun but also from surrounding towers, preserving privacy without sacrificing the views or Beirut’s beautiful light.
WHAT Beirut Terraces
WHO Herzog & DeMeuron
WHERE Minet el-Hosn, Beirut
WHY For its daring and elegance. A green vision for a city desperately short on vegetation and also because it’ll encourage residents to enjoy the local climate.
