Your source of innovation in architecture & design
People

Rising Talent Awards: Lebanon’s Socially Conscious Design

Rising Talent Awards: Lebanon’s Socially Conscious Design

This year’s edition of the Maison & Objet’s Rising Talent Awards featured six designers from Lebanon. The winners were selected by a jury that included Hala Mubarak, organizer of the 2017 Beirut Design Fair, Beirut gallery owner Joy Mardini and Marc Baroud, designer and founder of the design department at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts.

The winners, Carlo Massoud, Marc Dibeh, Carla Baz, Anastasia Nysten, Paola Sakr and Caramel Design Studio which consists of co-founders Karl Chucri and Rami Boushdid, were invited to display their work at Maison & Objet and at Gallery S. Bensimon in Paris.

In speaking with the winners, ArchiExpo e-Magazine found a trend of socially conscious design. The Ray chair by Massoud was built in collaboration with the Institute for the Blind. The metal frame is covered in woven rope completed by an artisan from the institute.

Baz, who worked in London’s fashion industry and shifted to design working for Zaha Hadid, returned to Lebanon to create her own design studio which only produces with craftsmen from Lebanon, telling us:

Because there is no industrial sector in Lebanon, design revolves around craftsmanship. I started trying to meet craftsmen and I fell in love with my country through these people.”

The forged iron of Baz’s Feuillage light fixture was made by an artisan specialized in balustrades, producing a result that is both classic and innovative.

Paola Sakr (see featured image) crafted beautiful vases that recall the broken neighborhoods within Beirut’s cityscape. As she states on her website:

In Beirut, you constantly lose yourself in a city that is mired in endless transformations and re-inventions, forever belonging to an era of transition. Beirut’s cityscape is an arrangement of miscellaneous architecture and broken neighborhoods, always reminding us of its destructive nature.

pub
Advertisement
pub
Advertisement
pub
Advertisement
pub
Advertisement
pub
Advertisement