Beirut City Centre is a regional shopping mall located on Damascus Road in Hazmieh Quarter. Enclosed on all four sides by the adjacent highways, the project tries to maximize site usage with multiple levels of underground parking and a hypermarket, shops, restaurants and cinemas arranged over four floors above.
All retail units are oriented towards a central 218m long atrium void that runs the entire lengths of the scheme, leaving the external elevations as mostly blank walls with little opportunity for windows and activation. A concrete fin facade was developed that plays with the perception of the building from the adjacent highway flyover and creates an animated, ever-changing curtain of colour, light and shadow during day and night.
The interior design of the mall creates a single unifying identity through the use of varying stone finishes, stepped slab edges, alternating bridges and escalators to allow visitors to perceive the entire length of the atrium space. An undulating steel rooflight constructed from structural fins provides daylight to all four retail levels and allows for views of the sky while providing shading and diffusion to prevent excessive solar gain.