Since its founding in 2020, the Elie Khouri Art Foundation (EKAF) hasn’t had a permanent home – that is, until now. Elie Khouri, a Lebanese-French art collector and founder of his eponymous foundation, has commissioned architect Sumayya Vally, principal of the architecture and research studio Counterspace, to design the contemporary art foundation’s future home.
Discover Sumayya Vally’s first project in the UAE
The project, which is set to open in 2028, will see a repurposed villa become a hub for contemporary art exhibitions, education, and public programming in Jumeirah 1. ‘Art belongs in everyday life, not apart from it,’ says Khouri. ‘My foundation will be a home for contemporary art, open to everyone.’
The existing villa and surrounding grounds will be renovated into a series of galleries, educational spaces, pavilions and a garden, while also introducing hospitality and outdoor spaces. The architect looked to the intertwining streets of Beirut and the courtyards of Gulf houses for inspiration – those are territories where the inside and outside collide.
The architectural vision is to move away from seeing the project as a conventional museum building and instead look at its relationship with the site’s context, creating an open and accessible place to enjoy art.
The South African architect has worked on numerous projects so far. She was the youngest architect commissioned to design London’s Serpentine Pavilion in 2021; she has directed the inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah; and she serves as ‘Architect-in-Residence’ at Ibraaz in London.
Khouri was drawn to Vally’s practice, which sits between architecture and artistic research, something that EKAF also celebrates.
‘I think of buildings as having many lives,’ says Vally. ‘At EKAF, we begin with a house that has already held a world within it. Its doors, cornices, balustrades, and particular ways of receiving people and separating rooms contain the traces of another life.
‘I am interested in what happens when we take these intimate geometries and give them a new public scale: when the architecture of a room becomes the architecture of a city-facing façade, and the memory of a house becomes the beginnings of an institution. I hope that artists, designers, researchers and makers from the region will bring other imaginations into the work, and that the institution will continue to acquire forms and meanings we cannot yet anticipate.’