B018 in Beirut
B018 is a music club, a place of nocturnal survival, designed by Bernard Khoury/DW5. The B018 project is, first of all, a reaction to difficult and explosive conditions that are inherent to the history of its location and the contradictions that are implied by the implementation of an entertainment program on such a site. B018 refuses to participate in the naïve amnesia that governs the post-war reconstruction efforts.
The project is built below ground. Its façade is pressed into the ground to avoid the over exposure of a mass that could act as a rhetorical monument. The building is embedded in a circular concrete disc slightly above tarmac level. At rest, it is almost invisible. It comes to life in the late hours of the night when its articulated heavy metal roof structure retracts hydraulically.
