Omnia

Omnia takes its place among the residential buildings of a well-established quarter of Beirut Central District by first respecting the street: its height and footprint continue the urban block face already set by its neighbours, and only within that discipline does the building develop a language of its own. Eight typical floors, each holding a single 500-square-metre apartment, stack beneath a large duplex penthouse, with retail boutiques at ground level. The result is a single, legible volume clad in grey zinc metal panels, its balconies traced in stripes of polished white stone and lined underneath in warm wood. Both the zinc and the stone are chosen to weather visibly, gathering a patina that will let the building settle further into the tonal range of the street around it as it ages. The building's real device is its sliding, folding zinc louvers, set at the edge of each balcony. Beyond their sculptural presence, dynamic against an otherwise still grey volume, they do real work: shading western light and moderating heat gain through summer, screening residents from the street below, and letting each household decide, floor by floor and hour by hour, how open or closed their facade should be. Closed, the louvers read as a dense, faintly reflective surface that only reveals the life behind it once the interior lights come on; fully open, they extend out to the building's edge. Every apartment's north-east corner opens onto a terrace through sliding doors from the living room, carrying that same calibrated relationship between inside and out down to the most private scale of the building.