Active Line
At the East entrance of Beirut, the capital city of Lebanon, Medawar a coastal area is disconnected from the rest of Beirut. It is surrounded by the sea on the north and west sides, by a river to the east and a large highway to its south. This part of the country went under continuous mutation (Refugee camps, Industrial & Artistic districts) due to wars that caused rural exoduses and emigrations. The main focus of this project is to find the most adequate solution to improve its environment. The proposed project "Active Line" studies the idea of how adding a station reestablishes a lost connection between different regions. It also looks into market demand and the surplus of introducing a mixed-use program.
Active Line combines both public spaces and public transportation thus raises the value of the area and its inhabitants. It creates a multimodal space linking different aspects such as private and public vehicles, transportation, pedestrian walkways and rail tracks. The idea of this transit hub is to serve as a study prototype and help develop several abandoned stations along the Lebanese coast using the same/similar standards and typologies.
This mixed used complex consitsts of three almost identical shape blocks. All three share two main notions; a public ground floor full of amenity spaces, and a natural park that sits around the train station and connects to one of the block's roof. The other two buildings consist one of a south facing residential building, with simplex and duplex units, and the other one of an open floor plan office spaces.
While each of the two buldings have particular floor heights related to their hosted program, they come to share common floors that offer flexible multi-use program spaces.
Wrapped in perforated operable metal skin, the residential building first offers privacy as well as cross ventilation to its north-south oriented units while animating its facade and therefore its neighborhood. Facing North and partial South-East, the glass office building gets clear daylight throught the day and collect solar energy on its sun facing facade to ensure sufficient energy to light up the train station at ground level.
Some of the residential duplex unit layouts are shown above in section and below in enlarged plan layouts.
