Campus de l'Innovation, de l'economie et du sport by 109architectes and Youssef Tohme Architects and Associates
Beirut
Program: A new campus for Université Saint-Joseph on Damascus Road, one of Beirut's main thoroughfares. The project—one of the university's several campusesin the city—includes an economics and medical research building, a medical clinic, a physical therapy building, two office buildings, and a large public center with an auditorium, exhibition spaces, athletic courts, and a pool. The six-story structures, with a combined 645,834 square feet, are arranged around a central courtyard.
Design concept and solution: Beirut's building regulations lack requirements for creating public areas or plazas, for shaping the urban experience in a way that makes a city a city rather than a series of independently constructed buildings. Working with 109architectes, the Y.TOHME team set up different spatial relationships between the campus and the city and among the campus buildings themselves. The architects treated the six buildings as a single mass carved up by a central void, which became the public plaza. They emphasized the idea of mass by concealing the buildings' concrete structures within white perforated concrete envelopes (save the large public building, whose steel structure is buried within a white polycarbonate facade). The masses recall traditional Lebanese modernist boxes but with a contemporary twist: the exterior walls are often tilted, angled, slightly off kilter, giving the campus a sense of unstable equilibrium. To further extend the complex's public space, the architects expanded the plaza up to the rooftops: a wide concrete outdoor staircase with entrances to every floor leads to the top of the economics and medical research building. Concretebridges connecting all six roofs bring visitors through a series of gardens and sitting areas to the pool and a cafeteria enclosed in a polycarbonate shell.
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