Modernist Beirut

From the 1950s, Beirut and Lebanon have been a veritable laboratory of architectural modernity in the Middle East, calling on the greatest national and international architects. Institutions and large Lebanese companies have turned to concrete and so-called brutalist forms, participating fully to the renewal of world architecture. If Lebanon gave birth to a flowering of exemplary buildings of this period, this work is an invitation to discover more than thirty, often unknown and admirably captured by the gaze by Matthieu Salvaing. By their selection, the authors invite the reader to follow in their footsteps at the heart of the various modernist experiences who crossed Lebanon as so many testimonies of an international and generous vision. Public commissions, such as the emblematic Tripoli International Fair built by Oscar Niemeyer or the Ministry of Defense of André Wogenscky, with private villas such as those created by Henri Edde, passing by the Interdesign building of Khalil Khoury, this work is the celebration of a history happy with Lebanon, rooted in modernity and open to the world. Text in English and French.