Beirut Museum of Art
architect replaced

Project to open in 2023

Architect Amale Andraos of New York-based WORKac has been selected to design the Beirut Museum of Art (BeMA), replacing Hala Wardé, who was commissioned for the project.

Andraos is Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia. She founded WORKac with her husband, Dan Wood, in 2003.

BeMA, which is scheduled to open in 2023, will be built on a site owned by Université Saint-Joseph across the street from the National Museum. It will feature a permanent collection of modern and contemporary artworks from Lebanon, the Diaspora, and the Middle East.

The Association for the Promotion and Exhibition of the Arts in Lebanon (APEAL), a nonprofit civil organization behind the BeMA project, launched a year-long competition for the museum’s design in 2015. An international jury shortlisted 13 architects’ designs. Paris-based HW Architecture, led by Wardé, won the competition in 2016. She was dismissed from the project in September 2018.

So far, BeMa’s collection is composed of 3,100 art pieces by more than 400 artists from three separate loan collections, which together offer a comprehensive overview of Modern and Contemporary Lebanese art. Lenders to the museum’s collection include the Ministry of Culture, Abraham Karabajakian and Roger Akoury Collection (KA), and Claude Lemand, a Paris-based gallerist.

Kerstin Khalifé, the conservator in charge of this undertaking, will be responsible for restoring 400 of the most important pieces in the collection over the course of the next four years.

Restoration will be done in partnership with the Department of Restoration of Paintings and Sculptures of the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, and the project will include the training of Lebanese students in restoration studies. Funding for the restoration laboratory was secured through a grant from the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.