Paul Kaloustian Architect shared with us his project Y Buildings, two separates buildings in the District of Ashrafieh, Beirut, Lebanon. See more images and architect’s description after the break.
Located on a lot sharing two roads in the District of Ashrafieh, in Beirut, the project responds to this urban condition by creating two seperate building. An office building on the main boulevard where several office buildings and banks have been built since the 80s, and a residential building on the Sursok road belonging to a more residential neighborhood with several old villas.
The proposed buildings interact with the corner office building (sofil) they are facing. The ground floor seem to be merging with the garden of the adjacent building, thus forming a continuous green landscape.
The two proposed buildings share a design strategy based on a free geometry, a round floor plan, while keeping their own identity and scale. The idea of stacking floors with a distinct reading of each apartment or office floor brakes the scale of the buildings and create specificity for each floor. The sculptural effect of the buildings is the direct result of the stacking strategy. On the other hand, the general shape of the buildings is the result of the imposed building regulation in Beirut.
The floor plan has an all glazed facade to allow maximum light to the interior and view to the outside. The privacy and sun shading issues are resolved by creating a seperate internal skin with moving wood panels for the apartments and sunscreen for the offices. The flexibility of this system creates an everchanging feature to the buildings with the transparent and the opaque qualities and reflections of the surroundings on the curved glass. The glass offers a unique quality of reflections, thus creating an illusion of transluscency instead of total transparency or opaqueness.
Due to the changing size of each floor, the apartments are not typical and have different sizes offering flexibility from 300m2 to 800m2 for the penthouse.
