The third installment in the Dongola Architecture Series explores the provocative and often polarizing practice of Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury through an intimate lens rooted in Beirut.
As with previous volumes, the series privileges critical conversations over monographic celebration—this edition not only follows Khoury's trajectory from student to self-reinvention in his fifties, but also presents him as both a product and provocateur of the city's contradictions.
This volume uses Khoury's work not simply as an archive of built projects, but as an investigative framework for understanding Beirut's urban complexities. It asks: how can an architect simultaneously challenge power and profit from it? Can one critically portray a city while being embedded in its elite networks?
Following the structure of earlier volumes—
Critical Encounters with Nasser Rabbat and
Notes on Formation with Ammar Khammash—Provoking the Territory mobilizes Khoury's thinking as a lens to reflect on regional failures to modernize, unlearn dominant fictions, and dive fearlessly into the architectural imaginaries of the Arab world. It is an invitation to confront the ethics, politics, and aesthetics of urban storytelling.
The Dongola Architecture Series (DAS) is a biannual book series that offers unique insight into Arab culture through the lens of its most iconic contemporary architects, and attempts to grapple with our environment's past and present to better inform how we design our future.
Each issue focuses on a specific architect's formation and processes, and on their contributions to regional knowledge production. DAS is not an endorsement of style, but rather of methodology, affect, and synchronicity with the world. It is an investigation of the ethics, politics, positioning, and decision-making processes of the people tasked to analyze, build, and narrate the world we live in.
Bernard Khoury was born in Beirut in 1968. He studied architecture at the Rhode Island school of Design and received a Master's in Architectural Studies from Harvard University. He is the co-founder of the Arab Center for Architecture and was a visiting professor in many universities both locally and internationally. He has lectured and exhibited his work in over one-hundred-twenty prestigious academic institutions across the globe. His work was extensively published by the professional press covering a significant portfolio of projects in over fifteen countries.
