French Avenue

In a pocket of Downtown Beirut just off the Souks, where low-rise buildings mix contemporary lines with older, traditional facades, French Avenue announces itself in glass. Rather than blend into its surroundings, the building meets them openly: a single level of retail and reception fronts the street, and six office floors rise above, making up a built-up area of some 12,000 square meters, closer to 19,000 square meters in total once the four basement levels are counted in. Glass walls with operable windows wrap the front elevation, paired with spandrels in a red-pigmented zinc that catches Beirut's light and slowly warms in tone through the day. The result is a facade that feels less like a barrier than an invitation, with daylight, ventilation, and a constant visual link to the city reaching every office inside. That sense of openness carries through into how each floor is planned. Horizontal circulation runs along the street-facing edge of the building, leaving the entire garden-facing side free for office space. Instead of a corridor cutting the plan in two, each floor becomes one large, uninterrupted platform, ready to be divided and redivided as a tenant's needs change over the years. Vertically, the building finds its center of gravity in a seven-story atrium, washed in daylight, and lined with green walls that pull the city's views deep into the plan. Climbing through this space is a stair of exposed steel and white silk-printed glass, visible from every floor. It turns a simple change of level into something more sociable, with staff pausing on its landings and walkways as often as they use them to pass through. Throughout, the material palette stays deliberately calm: white corrugated aluminum, maple wood doors, polished grey ceramic flooring, and planted flowerbeds, leaving the drama to the atrium and its stair rather than the finishes around them.