Amale Andraos, the dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and a prominent Lebanese-born architect, has been chosen to design a new museum in downtown Beirut. The Beirut Museum of Art will house a permanent collection of modern and contemporary artwork from Lebanon and the Lebanese diaspora and is scheduled to open in 2023. The design proposed by WORKac, an architectural firm led by Andraos and her husband, Dan Wood ’92GSAPP, calls for a six-story concrete and stone building with a network of balconies and open-air galleries enveloping its façade. It will be built on land that was once the dividing line between Muslim and Christian areas in the Lebanese civil war. Andraos says she hopes the museum will contribute to Beirut’s “creative and resilient life as well as to its optimism and confidence in a united future.”
