Koujak-Jaber Building
1967
Victor Bisharat
Nicknamed the Gruyère, the Koujak Jaber Building in Ramlet el Beida is an apartment building with a main façade covering the building at full height and consisting of a flat surface punched with openings. Large 3m diameter circular holes face windows and terraces. Between them are small elliptical openings disclosing the slabs and sidewalls separating the apartments. For a visitor arriving to the building and looking up, a perspective effect transforms the vertical ellipses into quasi-circles, and the circular openings into horizontal ellipses.
Bisharat, an expressionist architect, called for the freedom of the artist-architect; a creator of form. He stressed on the need to revive individuality in a world becoming dull due to perpetual imitation.
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