The project is done in partnership with Accent architectural practice from Lebanon. We have been working together on a number of built and not built projects in the past, and collaboration between us has always been the formative of the design process. The projects have never been split between the design and the execution, and information exchange has gone back and forth when buildings take shape.
For this particular one, we have worked predominantly on the massing and the envelope of the building in relation to the rocky landscape and pronounced topography of the surroundings. The project is situated in Faqra, Mount Lebanon at the altitude of 1500m and contains apartments planed as ski retreats for the people who live in the nearby city of Beirut.
The area is under stringent planning regulations which have conditioned the configuration of three separate buildings on the site. We have continued the logic of segregation further to establish seven differentiated volumes in relation to the structure of the apartment units. Moreover, maximum height and inclined roof rule have both been influential to the overall geometry of the envelope, but have been adapted differently and accordingly to the site conditions to each of the volumes. In result the project becomes a group of clusters formed by related but not identical components.
