Maison de l'artisan libanais

Notes

La Maison de l'Artisan was a project destined to exhibit craft products on a beautiful site by the sea. The building was a T-shaped glass box that ensured maximum transparency on all sides. In order to give the building a "character of Lebanese inspiration," arched columns supported the flat roof. Each supporting point was made of four square steel columns that spread diagonally to meet their counterparts, thus, virtually forming the skeleton of a groined vault. They were originally planned in concrete, but were executed in steel, a more feasible solution (The contractor, engineer Panay Akl convinced them that steel would be more appropriate. A blacksmith from Tripoli executed the remarkably well-done steelwork, and the low parts of the steel columns were filled with concrete).
As an answer to a delicate program with a need for attention to representation, the commissioner (the CEGP), saw in this project "a clever evocation of tradition." The structural idea for this project came from a previous project designed in 1956-57 by J. N. Conan: A technical school for handicapped children in Garches, near Paris. With a slight suggestion of the familiar arch in an otherwise "Miesian" box, the team resolved the paradox of compliance with the wishes of the CEGP to have a "Lebanese" building, and at the same time allow for maximum transparency, lightness and polyvalence of exhibition space, all modernist attributes.
The building was disfigured in 1999 by a shameless rehabilitation that transformed it into a décor recalling 1001 nights in which the glass walls were blocked by concrete, with an adobe finish, and the virtual vaults determined by the skeletons were filled with "real/fake" vaults of plaster.
(George Arbid)

Sources

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