ALL THINGS MUST('NT) PASS

All Things Must(n’t) Pass examines Lebanese architect Khalil Khouri’s work as part of a broader modern project shaped as much by production and optimism as by interruption and loss. Rather than a conventional retrospective, the exhibition frames his practice as a trajectory suspended between architectural ambition, industrial experimentation, and the political ruptures that redefined Beirut in the second half of the twentieth century.

Khouri belonged to a generation of architects working within a local modern condition. He believed in modernity as a social, technological, and productive framework, not as a fixed aesthetic language. His early commitment to a socially grounded architectural culture positioned architecture as an instrument of institutional and collective progress. The Civil War fractured this trajectory, redirecting his practice toward furniture, manufacturing, and smaller scale interventions. Modernity in his work migrated from the building to the system, from construction to production, revealing an architecture embedded in material culture and technological agency.

The Interdesign building operates as the exhibition’s central artifact and metaphor. Conceived as a showroom and industrial platform for his production enterprise, delayed by conflict, ultimately completed yet never fully activated, it mirrors Beirut’s own shift from a productive modern city to one marked by discontinuity and abandonment.

The exhibition assembles drawings, fragments, and narratives as acts of recovery rather than preservation. It positions Khouri not as a closed historical figure but as part of an unfinished local modern lineage, one that continues to inform how architecture in the Arab world negotiates authorship, industry, and historical continuity.