Why Bernard Khoury is in the Design 100

Bernard Khoury trained at the Rhode Island School of Design and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design before returning to Beirut to set up his own practice in the early 1990s. His first built work, the B018 nightclub, opened in 1998 on a site in the city’s Quarantina district that had seen wartime violence: a sunken, bunker-like structure whose steel roof retracts fully to the sky. It set the pattern for what followed, an architecture that sites itself deliberately within Beirut’s layered urban fabric rather than around it.

Later buildings, among them the Plot #1282 lofts and the Skyline tower, extend the same method: exposed concrete and steel, forms driven by the specifics of a site rather than a house style. Khoury has represented Bahrain at the Venice Architecture Biennale, shown work at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, and taught at the American University of Beirut and Harvard. That combination of a distinct architectural language and a sustained engagement with how Beirut gets rebuilt is what earns him a place in this index.