In Beirut, the Interdesign Building stands as a striking yet enigmatic structure. Never used since its conception in 1973, the building was designed by Lebanese architect Khalil Khouri and, in some ways, it represents a physical testament to the region’s hopes and struggles. During the inaugural edition of We Design Beirut, the exhibition “All Things Must(n't) Pass: A Subjective Recount Of Khalil Khouri’s Life And Career As A Designer” opened the building to the public, aiming to tell the story of its architect, Khalil Khouri, through the lens of his son and grandson, Bernard and Teymour Khoury. On this occasion, ArchDaily’s Editor in Chief, Christele Harrouk sat down with Bernard Khoury at his DW5 office to discuss the life of his father and a little-known chapter of Lebanese architectural history.
The video interview discusses the complex career of Khalil Khouri, an influential architect born in 1929 in Beirut. He began his architectural journey in the late 1950s, during a time of modernist enthusiasm in Lebanon, initially focusing on institutional designs guided by social-oriented ideals. However, the civil war in 1975 shifted architectural demands, leading Khouri to limit his projects to those for close friends or himself, diverging from his social roots. He shifted his attention to furniture design, creating modern, locally conceived pieces that were affordable for the Lebanese public. His belief in modernity and technological progress drove him to design not only the furniture but also the facilities and machinery for production, eventually becoming a successful industrialist.
In 1973, amidst his industrial success, Khouri conceived the Interdesgn building as a luxurious showroom for his furniture. Although construction began in 1974, it was halted due to the civil war. By the 1990s, as Lebanon's economy transitioned from production to finance, the showroom proved unsuitable. Despite financial challenges, Khouri completed the building, which was later abandoned for two decades after being seized by banks. Recently, Bernard and Teymour Khoury reopened the building for an exhibition, driven by Teymour's desire to learn about his grandfather’s life. This exploration revealed a poignant story of progress and decline, paralleling Beirut’s own journey while emphasizing the need for documentation among the architects of that era.
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ArchDaily (Christele Harrouk): First thing first, who was Khalil Khouri? To the modernist movement in Lebanon and his influences in the Arab World? But also to you?
Bernard Khoury: Khalil Khouri is a very difficult person to frame because he wasn't just an architect. He was born in 1929 in Beirut and was the son of a very gifted carpenter. Khalil wanted to be an aeronautical engineer, not an architect, but not having the means to go to study abroad, he had to resort back to architecture, a more reasonable choice. The early years of his career were very interesting because he took off quite quickly. These were the glorious years of the young Lebanese Republic, so we're talking 1950s, late 50s, early 60s. This was the time when the Old Republic was planned for modern projects, a lot of institutional projects. There's a generation, the first or second generation of modernists who did a lot of projects back then.
Khalil initially, in his younger years, had, I would say, some socialist ideas or very social-oriented ideas, which shows in his early works. Obviously, back then you had to have social-oriented ideas. So architecture was a political project much more than just a technical practice.
Then at some point, he started an industry because his grandfather passed away. He started a furniture industry with the family, and they democratized local furniture in the MENA (Middle East North Africa) region. It became, by the mid-1960s, the most important producer of modern furniture in the region. they started exporting even to very difficult markets such as Europe and the United States. This is a chapter that all the locals have forgotten, but there was industrial design here. There was an industry of furniture back then, so the stuff that was designed here was produced here.
I think that there was a pivotal time in 1975, for him, but also for the modernist movement in the Arab region. We tackled this issue at the 2014 Venice Biennale, with George Arbid when we did the pavilion that was supposed to cover all of the Arab world. In 2014 we were supposed to survey modernist works between 1914 and 2014, and we thought that it was a very political issue in our part of the world, in the Arab world. In 1914, there was the beginning of World War I, which brings us to Sykes-Picot, which brings us to the beginning of the nation-state. So, you cannot dissociate modernism from the political dimension, the nation-state, and what the colonialist forces did back then. It applies to Iraq, it applies to Lebanon, it applies to Syria and Egypt. Mainly this is where interesting things were happening in this part of the Arab World, so you put back Khalil in this context.
When we reached the 1960s here, it was the Fouad Chehab years, it's the golden years of the nation-state project. It shows in his body of work back then because most of the work at the time was institutional and was very engaged politically with a lot of social-oriented ideas. This ended for him in 1975. In this part of the world, you will see a very clear correlation between the bankruptcy of the nation-state project and the modern movement and modernist ideas. A very serious decline happens here, you can read it on the facade of the buildings, the bankruptcy of the nation-state, and the bankruptcy of the Modernist movement. It happened within a matter of 5 to 10 years, the Civil War of 1975.
After 1975, for Khalil Khouri the architect, there was a serious shift in terms of the demand. At that point, his industry was rising, he was doing great and he thought that he no longer needed to settle and negotiate his architecture. He decides to stop the profession, and he builds very little just for friends, people he was close to, or projects of which he is the developer, very strange for someone who comes from a social-oriented development. So, he becomes a developer, and he does a number of developments in which he is a shareholder. Strangely, if you look at how these projects are put together, you’ll see that it was always a social-oriented project when he was a developer. They were suicidal financially, and most of them ended up being flops financially. The same applies to the industry because by the early, mid-1990s, the industry’s stocks went down.
There's a lot of contradiction in trying to frame the person. I'm an architect, and most of my work remains pretty much within the territory of my practice. This doesn't apply to Khalil. Khalil Khouri had a very broad spectrum. He was also an artist but never sold his art, never showed his art, he was a very talented painter and artist.
He’s someone who is very much a self-made man who has a brilliant career as an architect but also simultaneously becomes quite a successful industrialist and a developer, and ends his life with a spectacular financial bankruptcy. I'd say the ups and downs are also very tied to the territory and a very specific modern project that you can read through his adventure one that you cannot compare to a typical architect career in Europe or the Western world.
It was very different here, and I think it's got a lot to do with the political conditions, economic conditions, the social and cultural conditions. It is very surprising to see that this man was also very open to Western culture, very open to many cultures. He brought all of that to me during my childhood whether it was poetry, literature, or other aspects. Again, think of him as someone who grew up in the 1930s and 40s, so there's something interesting about the French mandate years. He was the product of his context in that sense, there's a very specific modernity that comes out of that.
I think what's very interesting about Khalil is that he stays very consistent and very relevant throughout his life until the end. Many of the modern architects of that period shifted in the 70s and 80s. Khalil shifted, but it was not the shift that had to do with trends at all. Khalil remained extremely curious and open to progress, to science.
If anything, there was a naive belief in modernity until his last breath.
He kept designing planes in his 70s, and he manipulated computer-aided design software at the age of 60 and 70, while the guy could draw better than anyone I have ever seen. There are two people to me, who have an incredible gift and talent when it comes to drawing, it was Khalil and Lebbeus Woods, and no one else. So, this guy could create magic with a pencil and a piece of paper and could express himself so well, that he didn’t need technology to express himself. Strangely at the age of 60, and 70, he is at the peak of his technologies and he spent the last years of his career surrounded by screens and supercomputers, modeling airplanes and modeling his last designs. He had an almost naive belief in science, progress, and technology.
A lot of the architects of his generation shifted their styles following trends in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. I'm not going to give names, but it's obvious that architectural modernism was a trend and not a project for them. It’s not Khalil’s case. For Khalil it was a project, it was very serious, he believed in a project first.
AD: Back to the exhibition, how did you decide to team up with Teymour and create this first-ever exhibition about the life and career of Khalil Khouri?
BK: Teymour had a very strange curiosity about his grandfather. He barely knew him, because when Khalil passed away, Teymour was 8 years old, and for the last 6 or 7 years of his life, Khalil wasn’t even in Beirut, he had moved to the US. There was always a curiosity in Teymour, and he helped me through a very difficult phase which was to dig into the archives. These were very disorganized because this was a generation of architects that did not archive and did not document things, they were doers. So Teymour helped a lot in that aspect. He was pushing me to do this and was active in trying to make this exhibition. Khalil was a much more important chapter than we think.
AD: Why did you choose the space of the Interdesign building to be not only the backdrop of the exhibition but an integral part of the display?
BK: Well this building is very dear to me and it was very dear to my father. This building has a very strange and interesting story. It was conceived, during the peak of his industrial projects, back in 1973. Back then, the company was growing, everybody was buying the furniture, and it was furniture for the people. So, it was affordable, modern furniture, which was not usual for modern furniture of the time, as it was usually limited to the very select few who could afford a decorator or very expensive brands.
In the 60s Khalil brought to the market locally manufactured and conceived furniture. At the peak of that project in ‘73, Khalil designs a building in which he's going to showcase his furniture, which is quite a luxury element. So, you have an architect who designs the furniture that he produces in a factory he owns, the factory which he designed and built according to their procedures and the processes of production. The factory building was conceived for producing their furniture. They reached a point where they were so sophisticated and advanced in bending wood, that the machines they were buying from Italy to bend the wood were no longer sufficient. They started developing their own technologies and they started to manufacture their own bending machines in-house.
The architect designs and builds furniture in a factory that he has designed and built, with machines that he has designed and built. And now he designs and builds the showroom in which he's going to showcase his furniture.
This is the absolute fantasy that I don't know of any other project that has reached this industrial scale. This is where there's something very specific and particular in his career and his projects, even as an industrialist. The Interdesign building was conceived in ’73. They stopped construction at some point in 1974, they had reached the ground level in April 1975 and then the war erupted, so they stopped the construction. There were, I think, a couple of aborted trials to continue to build it through the war, but they failed to continue the construction.
The war ended in the early 90s, and at that point, the geography of Beirut had shifted. Where the building is located, in Clemenceau, it's no longer the ideal area for a furniture showroom. The industry has shifted the economy of Lebanon. It was never really a productive economy, but where you could aspire for an industrial project back in the '60s, by the 1990s, it became a purely speculative economy: tourism, banking, finance, and services. The productive sector is being slashed. He’s paying extremely high interest rates; the laws are not helping. It takes 3 to 4 years to completely destroy what had been built for three, or four decades.
By the mid-1990s, they were going bankrupt, they're not even realizing it. By the late '90s, they were bankrupt. But Khalil decided to continue the building anyway. He is in debt; he finishes it and never uses it. So that building that was conceived in 1973, 51 years ago has never seen the light of day. It was never used for its original purpose. It was seized by the banks. A few years later, my dad was gone and I saw this building shut down. It was used for a short period as a training center for the bank, but they couldn’t use it, they simply suffocated in it because it had no windows. You can't put any partition walls in it, so they leave it abandoned, and it's been abandoned for like 20 years.
We decided to revive it for four days, so you got more than half a century of latency and we revived artificially this building for 4 days. A lot of people asked me to extend it, but I decided not to because I thought that 4 days for half a century was not enough. But we are trying to revive this building for another purpose, and we are trying to see whether an institution can take over or at least operate it so that it becomes open to the public again.
AD: Bernard, what did you hope the visitor would gain or learn from this exhibition?
BK: I think that there are chapters about history that we failed to document. There's a memory that’s important to preserve, I’m not talking about a very objective history.
I’m talking about what escapes the very consensual, simplistic, and dangerous chapters of history. I think Khalil is an exception that defies this consensus. To me, the most interesting way to document a territory or a period is to see what escapes and to examine the accidents—what lies at the limits of the possible.
I think Khalil, in that sense, is a very interesting character because he doesn't fit the conceptual history. You look at some of his stuff and it seems impossible even for the time and certainly for today. I think it's important that people know about it. I was very touched to see people telling me that they had been driving by this building for 50 years and that they were very happy to walk in at last and see what it was about. I think we failed to write our history, to formulate it in a different way, and I think we have to work on it.
