Client: Transmed SAL
M & E Engineers: Barbanel, Lebanon
Structural Engineers: Bureau Rodolphe Mattar
Project Manager: Nabil Constantin at A. Manasseh Ings, Lebanon
Workspace Consultant: Santa Raymond, UK
Area: 2067m
Overall Cost: $1.62m
Completed: July 2002

Reaction
The primary challenge of this project was in how to accommodate a corporations brief and react to a rebuilt 1920s shell.

"They were built by foreigners who drew facades according to their interpretation of our culture... a colonial interpretation of a postcard city."
Bernard Khoury, interview.

We introduced curved glass prism rooms to each floor. These serve as meeting rooms, display cabinets and circulation distributors to the open plan offices. The curved walls & displays produced a strong shape, strong enough to become the main view. The largest prism room is on the smallest office floor and houses the boardroom. Walking between a curved wall and a flat wall reminds us of visiting Brunel's SS Great Britain in Bristol docks.

By day the 'prism rooms' work to diffract daylight into the darker corners of the offices, at night the prism rooms on each floor appear as one light shaft from outside