Mitri El Nammar Prize, Competition - ALBA

BurHotel, in Beirut, was awarded the Mitri El Nammar Prize. The project set out to resolve a defining architectural problem, how to intervene on the four story Barakat Building, an iconic landmark of colonial era architecture standing in a region of the city that had been torn by war, with a massive new construction rising above it.

The result is a considered dialogue between two architectural eras. The historic elevations facing the road were preserved in full, keeping the character and memory of the existing building intact along the street, while the new construction above asserts a distinctly contemporary language of its own. Where the original facade speaks in the refined vocabulary of its time, the addition responds in clean, rectilinear lines, a deliberate contrast that allows both architectures to be read clearly, each strengthening the presence of the other rather than competing with it.

The existing structure presents three elevations across its facade, and it is here that the design introduces its most resolved gesture, a series of curved elements that mediate the transition between old and new, softening the meeting point between the historic masonry below and the more assertive geometry rising above and along its sides.

The building's function was equally forward looking. Within the original four levels of the Barakat Building, the project introduced open, modular spaces conceived as offices for guests of the business hotel, available to rent by the day or by the week, one of the pioneering ideas behind what would later be known as coworking.