architecture buzz!!

Courtesy LAN Architecture

Mirror Tower is a key interested feature of  this 35,000 sq.m. 486 MINA EL HOSN project in Beirut Lebanon, Designed by French Architects Firm  LAN Architecture, followings are the architect statement

The city that wouldn’t disappear

As we well know, every city is singular. Yet clearly some are more so than others. Beirut is a unique urban phenomenon, literally inhabited by its history, and with each successive war or occupation finding the strength to combat its disappearance.

Courtesy LAN Architecture

The 486 MINA EL HOSN, the ‘mirror-tower’ designed by LAN, is to be built in the port area, opposite the Murr Tower, the shell-riddled building that has come to symbolise the civil war. The tower is absolutely novel in concept: the building’s skin will reflect the city surrounding it. One will be able to see it from everywhere, and everywhere one’s view will bounce off its mobile surface into the surrounding city, showing Beirut in all its myriad facets.

And of course behind this innovative technology lies a guiding idea: the impressive outline of 486 MINA EL HOSN, soaring above the skyline, will enable a kind of moving and poetic visual reconstitution of the city – a way of making Beirut itself, its light, diversity, districts and cultures, the tower’s very substance.

Courtesy LAN Architecture

The risk lay in constructing a new monument, a new prisoner of the city’s oppressive memory. True, the tower recreates the diverse histories and cultures that have made and are still making the city, but the building is a living, animated, changing entity. Its envelope will be an integral part of the city’s physical reality, giving it back a body, reflecting its myriad facts. In doing so, it will open up an invisible inner space, strike chords within us, almost effacing itself to become an active agent in Beirut’s reconciliation with itself.

Analysis
Identification of a city

What is a city? Talking about Beirut, one has to consider not a single context but a multiplicity of contexts.

At the outset, there are evidently the multiplicity, plurality and divisions that are part of the city’s very substance. With the passing years, Beirut has metabolised the communities that have forged Lebanon’s exceptional and tumultuous life into its urban structure, providing a geography and territory for all, each with their own lifestyle, culture and architecture. One only has to cross the city from north to south or east-west to savour the many perfumes of this unique assemblage. At a distance of hardly a kilometre, one sometimes has the impression of being at the other end of the world.

Courtesy LAN Architecture

The concept
From private to public, from vertical to horizontal

The 486 MINA EL HOSN is set in an area near the port close to the Marina and the Solidere district, on a plot flanked by Fakhreddine Street and Omar Daouk Street.

In a district already occupied by high-rise buildings, there was never question of merely building another tower, but rather of fashioning a new urban space, combining private habitat and public circulation, verticality and horizontality.

Courtesy LAN Architecture

The 486 MINA EL HOSN project is composed of three elements:

* The Tower proper is the project’s central and most visible element. The novel design of its mirror-envelope reflects views of the city back towards the city, enabling a visual reconstruction of its manifold identity.

Courtesy LAN Architecture

* The Base of the tower provides its residents with a public space playing with horizontality to create circulation and meeting places on a human scale, including a shopping mall, a public roof garden and pedestrian alleys.
* The five Blocks are intermediary residential spaces, imagined on the model of the oriental house. Acting as an interface between the project’s two other elements, they play on the dichotomy between exterior and interior.

The TOWER

The other side of the mirror / Visually reinventing the city. The project’s central element, the tower, enables a visual reinvention of the city.

The tower is the central element of 486 MINA EL HOSN. Its insertion in a district already populated with towers and steeped in history and symbols, prompted an in-depth reflexion on the project’s meaning. It was particularly necessary to create a dialogue with the Murr Tower, a monumental vestige of the civil war and one of the city’s iconic symbols.

But one had to go further than this, to remove the tower from its immediate physical surroundings and integrate it into a broader environment encompassing the entire city, yet do this without resorting to gigantism. Hence the fundamental idea of ‘meta-territory’ which led to the concept of the tower’s envelope as a means of visually reinventing the city, visually reconnecting urban elements beyond the tower’s immediate physical and material surroundings.

The result is an immaterial, constantly changing object, an architecture of lightness, glass and finely hatched steel whose game consists in effacing the building’s tangible limits by rendering the perception of a solid object superfluous within the poetics of the blurred and evanescent.
The city of Beirut, historically marked by division, can also see the tower as an animated mirror reflecting its living and tormented history and geography.

Courtesy LAN Architecture

Interior, exterior: effacing limits

The building, 142 metres high, its structured around a cruciform volume sheathed by a solar protection based on a 25×25m square unit. The facades of the volume at the heart of the tower are in black concrete, and the design of the openings follows the functional logic of the living units. The exterior skin consists of sliding perforated sheet metal panels with a mirror finish, acting as reflectors and protection against heat but also allowing light to enter.

Our vision of the tower is reflected away to other parts of the city but can also penetrate within. The tower’s cross-shaped ground plan frees its corners and imbues it with lightness and evanescence. Its limits are effaced and only the building’s core has substance. Depending on the play of natural light and viewpoints, the tower can physically reinvent itself in the changing light and points of view.

The Bankmed Foundation will occupy the tower’s first six levels, with an access from the street. The entrance hall to the apartments, imbricated at double height, enables access from the base’s inner street. There is a service level between the foundation and apartment levels.

The surface areas of the 20 apartments (duplex and triplex) range from 750 to 1200 m². A lift provides direct access to each apartment, which are entered via a ‘lobby’ acting as a filter between public and private spaces.

Courtesy LAN Architecture

The BASE

Recreating a public space
Commercial units, a roof garden, and pedestrian alleys: the tower’s base opens up a circulation area for the inhabitants of Beirut.

One of the project’s stakes was to materialise the renaissance of public and shared spaces in Beirut, after years of inter-community conflict for the control of city territory. Today, the development of new places of exchange (business centres, large hotels, etc.) is accompanying the modernisation of Lebanese society and its insertion into the global economy.

The base’s three levels form a 10,000 m² ensemble of commercial units ranging from 300 to 1,200 m², a public roof garden and pedestrian alleys, inspired by Beirut’s traditional urban morphology. Located on one of the city’s few green belts, the project has taken this specificity into account by ensuring that it respects the terrain’s natural slopes and differences in level.

Courtesy LAN Architecture

The BLOCKS

Imagining tradition
The five 35,000 m² residential buildings were imagined as a series of houses arranged vertically

Reinventing an oriental habitat…
Residential living concerns lay at the heart of LAN’s project, which for the blocks drew inspiration from various modalities of Mediterranean habitat.

It was a question both of providing a truly appropriable architecture, in harmony with contemporary lifestyles, and of revisiting historic filiations, in essence, of reinventing tradition.

Oriental patio houses, in the extraordinary relationship between exterior and interior that they manage to create, provide a generous living space rich in possibilities.

Courtesy LAN Architecture