Karim Nader’s “House For A Gemini” Holds Two Houses In One

With a massive body of work in both architectural theory and practice, Lebanese avant-garde architect, Karim Nader began his practice and academic work in 1999.  Continuing to enrich the discourse on design, Nader counts the  Amchit Residence, the BDL-CMA building and the House On the Rocks in his portfolio of acclaimed built projects that have been published extensively.   He has taught students at the American University in Beirut and the Politecnico de Milano, while his book,  For a Novel Architecture, ciné-roman 2000-2020, was awarded  Le Geste d’Or in Paris two years ago.

Nader embarked on a renovation of a family home, where the user's public and private functions are separated by a clear delineation: a partition which allows for the doings of these two areas in life to be performed separately.  Traces of the old family home remain, all while being re-imagined with harmonious links to its past. 

In the architect's words, he describes the home:

"The house for a Gemini had to become two. Split in half and clad in grey, it houses two houses in one, one public and one private with a sliding partition in-between."

"Remembrances of things past resurface on a canvas of gray, but a luminous gray, like the translucent mist of an imminent dawn. The space which is now called loft was once the family house, also the uncle’s office, and the architect’s, now his own house, himself having now become an uncle."

"A renovation as a rerun, or a second take on something that once was. Memories of the past uses persist and create superpositions of program that defy the usual norms of functionality: a main kitchen diametrically opposed to the dining space, a bedroom too far from its bathroom door, an entrance too wide to be just an entrance. But those clashes emit a new energy. What was once the dining buffet, enlarged, becomes the support for a program that never was in the picture: a yoga platform."

"The wall that separated the house that was rented from the office that saw the birth of the first architecture office becomes rice paper thin, mobile, in Japanese shoji style, discreetly sliding in various reconfigurations of space and multiple visual effects. The children's bedroom becomes black as the presentation room, could receive the now grown up nephews, the occasional friend or the child to come."

"As for the previous office entrance, its door is now a window, but the family garden remains as luminous from the now home office with a stone wall background that was once outdoors."

"At the intersection of those souvenirs that trail a public loop house on the garden terrace side and a private loop house on the inner side, lies the musical. The upright piano, surmounted by a calligraphic trinity of presence, absence and the transcendent expresses my dire need for harmony in the entrance that is too wide to just be an entrance."

See the cinematic moments within this home in the gallery below: