Insider Guide: What to See at We Design Beirut This October

For five days, Beirut writes itself in light, stone and thread, and We Design Beirut becomes the stage on which continuity is rehearsed in public.

The brief is unabashedly civic:empowerment, preservation, sustainability- You move between a mosaic house in Sursock, the exposed Roman Baths downtown, the haunted vertical of Burj el-Murr, a 1950s modernist building in Sanayeh mid-renovation, and the vast textile halls of Abroyan in Bourj Hammoud. Each site holds a chapter of the city’s memory; each exhibition asks what it means to keep that memory active.

At Villa Audi, Totems of the Present & the Absent reads like a salon of confidences. Designers answer a tender brief—to make for the Beirut we inhabit and the Beirut we miss—so objects arrive with the intimacy of letters. You catch the wit of Bokja, the quiet resolve of Nada Zeineh, the sculptural warmth of Georges Mohasseb, a flash of Jacopo Foggini’s alchemy; then the room takes over and the names dissolve back into a single conversation about dignity and becoming.

Down at the Roman Baths, Of Water & Stone lets marble do the speaking. Ritual becomes material, and repair is staged at civic scale. The sensibility ranges from Studio Nada Debs’ studied tactility to Carl Gerges’ sonic poise; there’s a disciplined elegance in Dori Hitti’s lines, a contemporary tenderness in Ahmad Abou Zanat’s gestures. The place imposes a hush—you don’t rush it; you let the stone slow your pulse.

Burj el-Murr is the week’s exposed nerve. Design “In” Conflict, organized with Archifeed, treats conflict less as event than as weather—a condition you design within. On those raw floors, students from across the country pin up prototypes and spatial essays with the urgency of a studio crit. Nothing here asks for polish. It asks for clarity, for the courage to answer “what now?”

At Immeuble de l’Union, architecture becomes its own narrator. Union: A Journey of Light, led by Karim Nader Studio with Atelier33, reads the modernist shell like an x-ray—light as sentence, space as archive. In parallel, Rising with Purpose gathers a generation under thirty that cares for beauty but refuses adornment without meaning. You meet a few anchors—Karel Kargodorian, Miriam Abi Tarabay, Marc-Antoine Frahi—then the group coheres into a single thesis: relevance is a design brief, not a press line. Arrive at dusk; the façade wears the evening like punctuation.

The Abroyan Factory is all heartbeat. In Métiers d’Art, designer–artisan pairings prove continuity needs neither pastiche nor purity—think Tessa Sakhi in dialogue with glassblowers like Nesrine Khalife, or Nada Debs re-threading marqueterie with Nabil Haswany. Threads of Life is a love letter to textiles—Bokja, Inaash, Sarah’s Bag, Salim Azzam—reminding you that fabric is a story you can touch. And Skin of a City by Patrick Baz and Anthony Saroufim turns bodies into a ledger of intimacy and dissent. Bourj Hammoud has always been an engine of making; here, the engine hums again.

Around the rooms, the conversation keeps pace. Talks circle craftswomanship and the economies it seeds, the ways conflict structures space, and how myth and memory slip into objects without turning them into props. The Educational Hub at ALBA runs in parallel—screenings, workshops, roundtables under the banner of “Lebanon’s Revival”—so you can move from seeing to naming and back again. Across town, showrooms extend the circuit: Fablab by Naggiar (catch Karen Chekerdjian among others), Iwan Maktabi with Shaha Raphael’s “Sediments” and a nod to David/Nicolas, Nalbandian threading heritage with contemporary designers like Selim Mouzannar and Samer Alameen. It’s a citywide footnote that reads like a chorus.

Two excursions stretch the frame. One maps Beirut’s modernist fabric by bus—street-level proof that ambition never left; the other heads to Tripoli, where Oscar Niemeyer’s Rachid Karami International Fair sits like a sentence that deserves to be finished. Both remind you that architecture here is public imagination as much as program.

Do it the JDEED way: start with stone, end with light. Morning at the Baths or Villa Audi; after lunch, let Abroyan’s workshops pull you into their rhythm; blue hour at Immeuble de l’Union. Fold a talk or an ALBA session into the middle so ideas keep pace with images. And leave room for detours—a coffee, a fabric shop, a façade you finally decide to notice. Beirut rewards digressions; they’re part of the exhibition anyway.

What feels different this year is the refusal of nostalgia. Traces aren’t erased; they’re activated. Craft is protected without being pickled, memory handled like live current. The city shows you where it hurts and where it heals—often in the same room—and design becomes the medium that can hold both truths without smoothing them over. If continuity is the promise, these five days make it tangible: not as a monument to the past, but as a practice for the future.

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Cheat Sheet

We Design Beirut runs 22–26 October 2025 across multiple city venues. Exhibitions are free and open to the public; select talks, tours and workshops require RSVP. Follow @wedesignbeirut for the live grid.