WORKac chosen to complete beirut museum of art in lebanon

back in 2016, new york-based WORKac revealed their design proposal for the BeMa: beirut museum of art. the project, which is set to open in 2023, was approached in a sort of personal way as one of the studio’s founders — amale andraos — is a lebanese-born architect that left beirut at the age of 3. featuring an art nouveau-inspired shape, the museum structure is a hybrid that blends public and private, iconic and generic, and large and small.

all images courtesy of WORKac

WORKac’s design for the beirut museum of art borrows from the modernist vernacular of the city to propose a more open model for the contemporary museum. the design rethinks the envelope of the museum using the balcony as a space for renewed architectural invention and openness. traditionally, beirut’s balconies provided shade as well as a mediating space between inside and outside, the street and the private house. for the museum, these reinvented balconies become a series of outdoor galleries in a multitude of scales and shapes, acting independently of the flexible museum floors inside, and creating a new gradient of publicly accessible spaces.

‘contemporary museums face a number of contradictory demands; the need to be grand in scale while encouraging contemplation and intimacy, to be both iconic and flexible, to display established art and support emerging artists, and to be both secure and open and inviting to a diverse range of people,’ comment amale andraos and dan wood, founders of WORKac on their approach when designing the beirut museum of art.

inside the beirut museum of art design proposal, flexible gallery spaces have been perfectly proportioned. on the outside, a vertical sequence of 94 project rooms will allow for new kinds of art to be commissioned, displayed, disseminated and experienced. as the museum expands, these outdoor galleries can evolve — they can be shaded to accommodate more sensitive works or even encased in glass to provide for additional indoor gallery space.

project info:

principals: amale andraos, dan wood from WORKac
project architect: maurizio bianchi mattioli
team: sarah sioufi, mia baraka, nevin blum, yongsu choung, robert boyuan jiang, alana rogers, thomas smith, tommaso sordon, easan wang, bo zhang
structural, sustainability, facade engineers: werner sobeck
images: raymond adams