In Beirut Terraces by Herzog & de Meuron, the architectural discourse is led not by surface treatment but by the tectonic composition of cantilevered slabs, where structure acquires an expressive and ornamental dimension while the facade—conceived as skin—withdraws into a transparent and secondary role, porous and almost invisible; this reversal of hierarchy displaces the modernist paradigm of modular repetition with a stratified, almost geological accumulation of platforms, generating inhabited voids, shaded interstices and suspended gardens that blur the line between enclosure and openness, crafting a hybrid habitat that oscillates between the domestic and the environmental, the constructed and the climatic, in a city like Beirut, marked by density and layered trauma, the building operates as a spatial mediator between privacy and exposure, memory and aspiration, refusing iconic gestures in favour of adaptive and responsive form; its sustainability is not derived from technical systems but from spatial intelligence, reviving vernacular Mediterranean strategies such as superposition, air circulation and vegetal filtering, where each terrace—singular in its depth and offset—unlocks a different spatial configuration, suggesting a deliberate deprogramming of typological constraints, allowing a multiplicity of uses and encounters across vertical strata, this pluralism constructs an urbanity without homogenisation, proposing a monumentality without monument, a presence that asserts character without symbolism, its architecture becomes a statement on how structure can reclaim meaning within a post-conflict skyline, where architectural form no longer seeks permanence through solidity but through contingency, heterogeneity and climatic generosity.
