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I would like to start this short talk with a small incident that happened earlier in my professional life.

The only time I recall being discriminated for being a woman was when I was still a student in the seventies. Good students used to get by priority some offers of training abroad. For my luck, that year, two offers for training, one coming from Spain and one from U.K were available only for men. I still managed by myself to get a training in Vienna. That was, fortunately, the only time I was ever discriminated as a woman until today: As I am standing here just because I am a woman, called for that again by Spanish women. This is probably what could be called positive discrimination.

Apart from both these incidents, I never really felt in my practice the difference of being a woman architect: Being a man architect or a woman architect, the same realities whether interesting or cumbersome are to be faced.

The subject of my intervention being the link between tradition and modernity in architecture, I will again start from another incident of my professional life. While pursuing a higher level of education in the States, I realized that I was very intrigued by the movement that started in the seventies of re-using old structure such as warehouses or disused industrial or even religious buildings with new various functions such as residential or cultural uses. That was contradicting the basic concept of modern architectural education that “Forms follows functions”. These buildings and their transformations appealed much more to me than any skyscraper on Fifth Avenue whoever was the architect that built them. These structures were furthermore anonymous and had no famous architectural name attached to them.

The seventies also raised the interest into vernacular architecture: the book “Architecture without architects” became a best seller as the architectural treaties of Le Corbusier were best sellers in the fifties and sixties.

Loaded with all these new ideas, I happened to visit Spain on my way back to Lebanon. That is where I felt for the first time (and probably last time) an architectural choc: the visit of Alhambra in Granada. That is a building that is so simple externally and so complex internally:

A lesson in humility.

A lesson in environmental integration.

A lesson in perennial architecture.

Also a discovery for me of two major sources of inspiration: the combination of Mediterranean architecture and Islamic architecture.

I tried as much as I could in the practice of my professional activity to keep these furtive moments of architectural pleasure as vivid as possible.

I kept trying to mix traditional, historical, and vernacular elements with modern attitudes, updated building technologies and renewed social realities. Most of all I also tried to keep a kind of architecture that is respectful of the surrounding urban or rural environment, meaning a kind of architecture that volumetrically, culturally and aesthetically is in phase with its direct environment.

Simone Kosremelli, Lebanesse architect.

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