It’s not been a good summer for cultural tourism in Lebanon. Expats, urged by their embassies, have been flocking out of the country since July due to recent political assassinations, war with Israel, and the deadly attack by Mossad where pagers and cell phones exploded. We Design Beirut, a new 4-day multi-site exhibition which took place last May, and the effervescent design culture it garnered, stood in stark contrast to the Lebanon of today.
Initially, We Design Beirut (WDB) was postponed because of the war against Gaza. The second edition of WDB is meant to open in October 2025. “I think we’ve all learned that it’s never going to be stable here. A year and a half gives us enough time to prepare,” said Mariana Wehbe, the mastermind behind WDB. “We have been through the August 4 explosion and the stress of constantly expecting an outbreak of war. It’s part of our cultural resistance to continue no matter the circumstances.”
While all the sites were distinctive, the most architecturally impressive intervention in WDB’s first edition was at Interdesign, the showroom for a furniture company owned by Lebanese architect Khalil Khouri that never fulfilled its designated function. Construction on the building began in 1973 and finished in 1996 after the Lebanese Civil War (1975–91). The cascading Brutalist structure has been shuttered for over 50 years, after being seized by the banks due to Interdesign’s insolvency.
During WDB, Interdesign showcased All Things Must (‘nt) Pass, a retrospective indebted to the building’s architect, Khalil Khouri. Curated by Bernard Khoury, Khalil’s famed architect son; and grandson, Teymour Khoury, the retrospective was timely and revealing. Much of Khouri’s archive was destroyed when his office burnt during the civil war—his most prolific years.
All Things Must (‘nt) Pass was a moving testament to a modernist utopian vision that was not only aspirational, but outward-looking for its time as Interdesign became its own autonomous production unit in the 1970s that innovated woodworking techniques at home while producing ideas and objects that were on par with the international design landscape. Like the state of the country, Interdesign embodies a container of unused potential, rudely stunted by war and continued crisis. The void left behind in Lebanon’s uninhabited buildings serve as material manifestations of gaps in collective memory, ever in limbo, even in anticipation of stasis.
“It sits beautifully on the land”
The spinal atrium, which sits between two uneven, stepped towers, became an interstitial setting for 25 split-level plateaus wrapped around it. Here, Khouri’s ephemera debuted for public view. The exhibition included documents, designs, never-before-seen artworks, prototypes, and models by the architect. Watery landscapes sat with ease next to female nudes in watercolor, which progressed into surreal compositions of multiples: eyes, bodies and geometries.
In his Sketches for Laminated Wood Chairs, naked figures lounge on furniture. The architectural drawings are spare, precise, and integrated with landscapes and social scenes. Khouri, who wasn’t religious, created contemporary-looking churches with angled roofs evident in sketches of the 1970s unbuilt Mont La Salle Church. The villa he did for the pilot René Abdullah is a notable box-like structure framing stone that’s open to the elements.
“It’s made of concrete with a filling of coarse stone like the terraced stone of the site. The dining room has an extension to the outside via stairs,” said architect and academic George Arbid. “It sits beautifully on the land….Khoury didn’t feel forced to replicate existing forms. He was not particularly interested in local architecture,” Arbid continued.
Fittingly, Arbid spoke to me from Dar el Maasser, a mountain house that he renovated into a three-bedroom guesthouse. Beneath its stone vaults, art deco lighting, and contemporary furniture converse with the original structure. The Dar is part of a growing trend of tasteful bed-and-breakfasts offering retreats for locals and internationals alike in remote areas away from the charged city.
Revisiting Modernist Lebanon
“I was always interested in Lebanon’s recent past,” continued Arbid. “It escapes the oversimplification of our identity through Tradition or Modernism, where ‘Tradition is Us’ and ‘Modernism is Other.’ What we call ‘Tradition’ is in fact a compilation of Modernisms over time. For example, there are photos of Zahle [in eastern Lebanon] without a single red tiled roof, which means the camera arrived before the red tile did. Red tiles were modern.”
Arbid’s dissertation focused on modernist Lebanon from the 1940s through the ‘70s, a time of big ideas and fervent exchange fueled by renowned urbanists like Michel Écochard, as well as expats raised in Lebanon who made a name for themselves such as Grégoire Sérof and Raoul Verney. “There wasn’t one movement or school of thought,” explained Arbid. “Lebanon’s modernism is multi-faceted. It’s a chapter of history that needs to be revisited.
As part of his research, Arbid conducted 20 interviews between 1998 and 2000. One was with Khalil Khouri, and appears in the Interdesign show. This is how Arbid met Khalil’s son Bernard; the pair eventually became founding members of the Arab Center for Architecture in 2008. “The architects working in Lebanon at that time saw themselves as part of the world,” Arbid explained. “Some were influenced by Le Corbusier but they also looked at what was already present. Khouri’s generation was one of experimentation and emulation. They were comparing each other’s work and trying to do better.”
“I often think of performance rather than function,” Arbid continued. “If a design satisfies what it is supposed to be doing—a building, table, chair, spoon—then it is fulfilling its task and it is performing well. Dysfunctional design is something that doesn’t work but is unique.”
A Modern Beirut in the Making
Khalil Khouri’s furniture company was far from focusing on one-offs. It mastered the technique of bent wood at 180 degrees, evidenced by the award-winning Cologne chair—a bit like a static version of the Eames Chair.
“There is no precedent for this,” Bernard said, “Lebanon was never an industrial country so Khalil, who worked with his brothers, had to create an autonomous unit of production. The architect, as both manufacturer and designer, planned his factory, constructed the machines to make the furniture and by 1970, and conceived the building in which they would be showcased. I wouldn’t in my wildest fantasy dream of having access to these conditions. There was a modern Beirut in the making and the furniture produced was part of that. It was the blind belief in progress.”
By the mid-1970s, Bernard’s father’s 20,000-square-meter factory, (about 65,616 square feet) which employed 300 workers, was exporting to France, Germany, and the U.S. Interdesign democratized and mass-produced furniture, making it accessible when very few could acquire foreign brands. Khalil worked with international designers like the Italian Piccaluga brothers in Lebanon until the war started and they left the country. Their orange velvet Cushion Chairs were on show next to other handsome designs in leather and wood at WDB. The last desk Khouri designed, the Incha, signals the height of power: A 500 kilogram (1,100 pounds) curvaceous solid wood surface boasts a marble foot rest so feet never need to touch the ground. The building’s facade had to be dismantled for it to be shown.
Bernard explained that the factory went bankrupt in the late 1990s and ever since, real estate in Beirut has been more valuable than debt. But the banks didn’t seize it and kept the interest rates up. In a way, the story of Khouri’s demise forms a parallel narrative to that of Lebanon’s glory years to postwar catastrophe.
“His fate was tied to the territory,” Bernard shared. “He survived the war but not the postwar years where there was a drastic shift in economy towards speculation. Interest rates were raised to abnormal levels [which has exploded into the current financial crisis]. This took a lot of cash out of circulation. As Dad bought new machines to prepare for construction projects he was developing, the interest for loans was suicidal. It took less than five years to destroy our productive industries, including agriculture.”
Parallel Narratives
Beneath this drama is the story of a man with humble beginnings. Bernard describes Khouri building airplanes from his carpenter father’s wood workshops, which he would fly at age 12. At first, Khouri wanted to become an aeronautical engineer but, without the means to study abroad, studied math instead. When joining the Lebanese air force wasn’t what he imagined, he went to architecture school, though he kept his passion for flying alive. “A few months before he passed away, I found a design for an airplane with a backwards propeller similar to the last generation of military drones in use today,” Bernard said.
The exhibition had a bit of a boy’s club feel with photographs of Khouri with his compatriots around planes, architectures, and ideas, where furniture designs were peppered with women and fluid paintings. There was also a dose of romanticism.
“[Khouri] always had a fisherman’s basket in the trunk of his car and whenever he saw something inspiring off-road, he would sit and paint,” recalled his son. It took time for his hopes and dreams for Beirut to be squashed. “On one of his site visits to my brother’s house that he was building in the U.S., he just never moved back. He spent the last six years of his life there.” There’s a single self-portrait of Khalil Khouri, smoking a pipe which is all abstract connecting lines with gaps where features are not fully formed, prompting questions as to who he really was.
Mariana Wehbe intimated that the necessity to re-narrate the past is precisely because complete archives of the country’s built heritage are missing. “We would like to highlight our phenomenal architects like Khouri, as well as Joseph Karam and others.” Karam’s Egg, a spaceship-like unfinished cinema that haunts Beirut’s central district, was interrupted by the civil war. Unlike Interdesign, it has been occupied several times for talks, activist protests, and art exhibitions. Since Interdesign has no windows, it is against the law for it to be occupied as anything other than a showroom—it remains a capsule of frozen time that persists in the present.
Nadine Khalil is an independent arts writer, researcher, curator, and content specialist from Lebanon based in Dubai, UAE.
