House for an Expat

A Typology of Transience

Gabriel Khalife

The question this work approaches is that of the expat and the architecture that underlies their transitory lifestyle.
Their unique experiences, reflected in their choice of habitat, might at first glance be classified as liminal, in the vein of other types of nomadic, traveling, or otherwise stateless people around the world. Existing between borders, the expat is found across the globe, in dwellings of all kinds, but nowhere is their existence more of a presupposition than in the Middle East, where boundaries, histories, and traditions fluctuate incessantly. In this flux, some of the region’s historically most pertinent typologies, which are deeply rooted in this question of ‘transient living’, are born and carried over into our time. Lebanon—the country I am from—with roughly three-quarters of the population living abroad as I do, provides the ideal looking-glass. Contemporary examples of Lebanese expats and their various experiences and accommodations abroad are case studies that help define the status quo. A framework emerges then, extracted from the region’s own commotion to the state of its home abroad, that reflects the paradoxical nature of the expat themselves, of their strenuous elasticity, their outdated contemporaneity, their static exuberance. The resulting proposal for a new kind of transient, collective living space is placed in the context of Bejjeh, a small village on the central massif of Mount Lebanon. The House for an Expat exists in response to that reductionism which is based in the patterns of history,
typology, replicability, which results in our current notions on flexible living and to an extent, life itself, being
only the symptomatic background to the expressions of transient form.