Ghiryan Hotel

A 7,500 m2 hotel and commercial complex on a former club site in Ghiryan, conceived as a civic anchor for a city that calls itself the capital of the western mountains. The programme gathers a hotel, retail, a cinema, a media centre, and a public plaza into one building, so that the town gains a meeting place as well as beds.

The form is taken from the ground it stands on. The mass folds and lifts like the mountain the city sits on, and a single perforated skin wraps the folded volumes so that the complexity of the massing reads calmly from the road. Nothing in the material pretends to be local stone; the building acknowledges the mountain by its shape, not its surface.