WAF World Architecture Festival Awards 2016

This project summarizes a flexible architectural solution for the future headquarters responding to its direct needs today and caters to their evolution in the long term. While it aims at anchoring the bank’s contribution to its current urban, social and economic setting, the project importantly embodies above all a physical “platform” from where the bank will launch the changes into the future. The attempt is made to create a building that is not a passing fashion fad, but a solid and more timeless container for the people to work, live in and grow in the long term.

The proposed architectural scheme is seemingly very simple on the outside but houses a carefully layered working and living environment on the inside. It subtly caters to its users and neighbors, improving and adding comfort and joy to their lives at many levels (literally). This duality in our approach is in fact at the core of the project’s design philosophy. It is meant to contribute to Mar Mikhael’s changing landscape, and to open some of its public areas to its residents while serving its users and clients in the most efficient and secure way.
The Platform aims at being a timeless and elegant structure that resolves the profound needs of the company while anchoring its values through a new image and supporting its community. That has been our main objective from the start of the design as we outline it below.

At this important threshold in the history of the bank’s evolution, the new headquarters is meant to become an exemplary landmark in the city, a clearly legible totem fronting both Mar Mikhael and the Beirut harbor. The solution put forward by this flexible and evolving Platform directly personifies physically and functionally the moral and ethical elegance that this bank embodies in the banking sector.

The neighborhood scale

The first tier of the project acts mostly as the interface between the Tower and the immediate neighborhood and relates the building actively to its direct surroundings and vehicular load. It is where most visitors, clients, employees and others will first experience the headquarters.

The Lower Ground Floor Level (at street grade) is fully dedicated to the urban user.

The second tier is a pedestrian-only Raised Ground Floor, where the interaction with the public happens away from the cars’ constraints. This leads the visitor to the main lobby and secret gardens as well as opens up the views all around the site. This level invites and carries the public to higher grounds, whisking them away from the city hustle and bustle and low limited views, and lifting them onto a new unexpected space 6 meters above the roads with open vistas to the city, the port and the Mediterranean beyond. Towards the city, these two grand spaces connect through a lush and serene secret garden of jacarandas that wraps around the tower on both sides to open up the first vistas to the sea as you enter the building.


The City Scale

The tower comes in as a new player in Mar Mikhael and its fast evolving fabric and skyline. Aligned with the company´s identity and values, the secure and clean building signature is central to its comportment, image and design.
Flash or ostentation are eschewed in favor of a more understated sculptural visage that changes subtly with the light and from every angle in the city while keeping its strong totemic identity. This new landmark reads as a powerful and stable monolith from afar, while its sophisticated skin displays the office work transparency in a subtle play of light and shadows, the noble materials as you get closer.

The resulting sculpture is a porous platonic form with sizable landscaped urban terraces carved out of its four corners rhythmically at different levels. Lit at night, these sky gardens become the signature, recognizable from all around the city, while its core body can be made more transparent as well.

Platform Gardens – working in your garden with a great sea view.

In a city thirsty for planted space, this green Platform commits to returning more landscaped green area while offering a healthier working environment. To that end, we have created open suspended Sea Gardens as well as the City Gardens on every single floor of the tower. These landscaped semi urban pockets will become the vital lungs of the project, both practically and visually giving a signal of hope and sustainability to the tattered Beirut skyline.


At the heart of the tower, a flexible, stackable office plate

We have designed the working area with the comfort, ease of use and the health of the end user in mind; this is the sure way to a more efficient working scape, an engaging place where the employees feel at home (or better then at home), a workplace they’re proud of, and happy to come back to every morning.
The 30m x 30m square layout of the office floor around an off-center core is very flexible, structure free, and offers multiple layout opportunities to suit the different departments.

Additional open stairs are planned when needed to link different floors and departments together (around their Sky Gardens). They allow for direct interaction and communication every day without having to use the 8 high-speed elevators. They also allow the immediate floor plate to grow naturally from about 750m2 to a sizeable 3000m2 by using the stairs up and down (healthier too).

The proposed 4.60m floor-to-floor finish allows for exceptionally lofty ceiling heights (about 4 meter clear above the raised floor) and will stretch the tower signature higher in the Beirut skyline in the process. This by itself with the column free open space is a rare quality in today’s built office environment and will become a real life quality asset at once discrete and inspiring for all the Platform people.

Project: Bank Headquarters
Plot Area: 2 340 m²
Total BUA: 11 247 m²
Location: Beirut, Lebanon