Bernard Khoury’s presentation will begin with a reflection on the work he produced for the Seoul Architecture Biennale five years ago, titled Place Your Bets, Hold Your Bets. The piece reflects on his practice in Beirut and across the region during the two decades preceding the 2019 collapse of Lebanon’s economic sector. The installation revolves around major political and financial events, including the crash of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, which led to the rise and celebration of Lebanon’s Central Bank governor, whose strategies were believed to have shielded the Lebanese economy from the effects of the global financial crisis.
The lecture will first focus on the highly specific strategies Khoury developed through his local practice, which largely revolved around financially speculative private-sector commissions. In counterpoint, the presentation will conclude with a selection of his international projects, most of which were commissioned by the public sector on foreign territories.
Bernard Khoury
Born in Beirut in 1968, Bernard Khoury studied architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and Harvard University. He co-founded the Arab Center for Architecture in 2008 and was a visiting professor in several universities, including the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and L’Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris. He was the architect and co-curator of the Kingdom of Bahrain’s national pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014.
