Photographer: Philippe Van Geloven
Once upon a time, on the Belgian border with the Netherlands, there was a picturesque city named Bilzen. On one of its quiet, tree-lined streets, a retired couple are living happily ever after. Their abode has a transparent facade that resembles a display cabinet by day; glassily austere between the brick work that flanks it. At night, coloured lights pick out two angled balconies, suspended in mid-air like a paused game of Tetris. This is the house that Bassam built.
Bassam El Okeily is the architect behind the ‘Narrow House’, so named because it is only 5.3 metres wide. Born in Alexandria, he graduated from Paris’ École Speciale d’Architecture and has worked under Pritzker Prize winner Christian Portzampac. He opened his own atelier in 2006.
Something of a storyteller, Okeily constructs narratives even as he builds walls. ‘I intend to tell a fairytale and offer it to the street,’ he says. ‘Tell the story of the people who live in it and the relationship between them. The facade sums up and speaks about a couple and their life. The real raw material of my design is the life of those people I’m building for.’ This imbuing of meaning – that translates a space to a place – is integral to his understanding of architecture. ‘When you try to give meaning to the walls, then any construction becomes architecture.’
The couple in question – Renée Menten, an artist, and Mikey Bienkens, an art historian – have been together for over 40 years. Okeily attributes the longevity of their relationship to a nurturing of their complementary passions. When imagining their perfect home, they sought an evocation of their daily engagement with art; something liberated from the homogenising restraints of the town profile.
Creativity, in all its unorthodox potential, is manifest on the building facade. The lower balcony – Renée’s study – is hidden from the street, reflecting the intimacy of reading and research. The upper balcony, an extension of Mikey’s art studio, is completely open. Okeily explains, ‘when you create something you like, you don’t want to create it for yourself. It’s the soul of creation: you want to show it to people, and get their reactions.’ However, they are not exhibitionists, he insists. ‘This is the contradiction of this facade – it’s completely open, but you don’t see a lot of what happens inside.’
From the outside the building could well be a shop or museum and Okeily treasures this playful ambiguity. ‘If the shape doesn’t show the function, then the information, if it doesn’t come directly to your brain, then it has a chance to come directly to your heart.’ He believes that contemporary architecture fetishises light, glass and transparency, to detrimental effect. ‘If you have light everywhere in architecture, then the light has no meaning. If you want to appreciate happiness, you have sometimes to pass through sadness or melancholy. And if you want to appreciate light in a building or a space, maybe you have to go through shadow.’
The narrowness of this space – a former garage – proved especially challenging. Okeily knew that he wanted the very core of the space to be completely dark, and sculpted other walls so as to direct light around the space. He does however take a dim view of architecture that freely angles and sets walls askew without any attention to the light, affect and psychology of the space.
Like the facade, the interiors are boxily white, clean and minimalistic. Small quirks however, like a painting of a kettle propped up against the kitchen counter, suffuse the space with an inviting lived-in warmth, and avoid the dreaded i-Pod cube effect. With his attention to the atmosphere and emotional resonance of a space, Okeily’s approach recalls Goethe’s famous assertion that architecture is frozen music. He shrugs, ‘I am a kind of frustrated architect. Other kinds of art have a lot more emotion and bring a lot more happiness but architecture stays a very cold art. It’s very difficult to have architecture emote and speak to people.’
Architecture also promotes a cemented finality that does not leave room for second chances. ‘When you are an artist and you paint, you have a lot of freedom with your brush, and can restart your canvas 100 times. But with architecture, if you do not like it, you cannot destroy it and rebuild again. Even with my pencil I do not have the freedom of the artist with the brush. You have a lot of constraints – technical, budgetary, muncipal and the wishes of the client. To make art through all these constraints, this for me is the majesty of architecture.’
Okeily also maintains: ‘I don’t want to be thinking from morning to night about architecture. I would like to escape through dreams, through music, through literature.’ Still, he imposes certain restrictions on his own influences, preferring to intensively study and draw from just a few people in each artform. From film, the Russian director Tarskovsky; from literature he prefers Syrian and Iraqi poetry. In philosophy, meanwhile, it is Nietzsche, Deleuze and Plato. Even as he incorporates these multivarious influences, he is careful not to clutter his aesthetic.
In particular, he likens his praxis to that of Deleuze’s humble tick. Despite all the competing distractions in the jungle, this little insect is single-minded in its quest for blood. It carefully positions itself on the highest branch, seeks out the light, and thoroughly investigates its victim to find the spot with the most skin and the least fur. From all the richness of the jungle, the tick takes only these three elements. Okeily compares this to our current period, where the internet, Facebook and Twitter all compete to monopolise our attention. Despite the wealth of stimuli, he says: ‘I don’t forget that as an architect, my understanding of the world will stay like this tick. The space I build, the light that enters that space and the meaning; the social or emotional value of those walls.’
Today, Okeily divides his time between Paris and Brussels, returning to Alexandria every year. But in spite of his storied reputation in Europe, he remains unknown in the Arab world. He finds this heartbreaking. When the Egyptian revolution began, Okeily became active online through petitions and Facebook. Yet ‘Bloody Wednesday’, when mounted militia descended upon Tahrir and began shooting protesters, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. ‘When they started beating people inside Tahrir, I couldn’t stand it. I left all my jobs; I left everything, took the first flight and went and camped for 10 days at Tahrir. It was the most frightening moment of my life, but also the happiest.
Even as he speaks to human sweetness in his work, he is reluctant to meld architecture and politics. For Okeily, any creative activity requires conditions of absolute autonomy, saying ‘to have the maximum freedom you have always to speak about yourself. When you are involved politically, you start to speak about a side. Right, left; you have to make compromises with other people who are involved in politics.’ At the same time, he maintains that ‘there are just a few moments in life when it really concerns the dignity of the human being; then any creative person has not even the right, but the solemn obligation to go and fight’.
Okeily extends this black-and-white approach to his everyday practice. After spending time with his clients, he retreats to draw, and returns with only one design. Take it or leave it. He likens this process to being immersed in a submarine, saying, ‘For me, architecture is a a question of belief. What I really like is this adrenaline – if you really believe in something there is
no place for a grey zone’.
He also stresses he has no interest in building glassy goldplated paeans to corruption and consumption. These he dismisses summarily: ‘It’s my passion. I don’t play with it just for matters of finance’. His ideal projects instead realise a desire to see creativity and cross-cultural links flourish within the Arab world. ‘I have always dreamed of making a bridge in Tangiers, between Spain and Morocco. A real link with a lot of symbolism, between North and South. A house for poetry in Alexandria, in a little fishing neighbourhood by the sea. An ecumenical building in Beirut – both a mosque and church – to bring people back together. And of course I always dream of rebuilding the Baghdad Museum.’
He is currently working on residential and medical projects in Bordeaux, southern France, and is excited about an upcoming social housing project in Belgium. ‘This is something I always wanted to do; it’s a nice challenge, how to provide quality without a lot of money. I hate this idea that quality is only for the rich.’ Above all, Okeily sees architecture as an expression of a primal urge to be remembered; it is the most permanent trace a human can leave upon the world. He notes, we understand our distant ancestors by excavating the walls they built around themselves. The architecture of today meanwhile indicates how we will be remembered in the future. He sums up this sentiment: ‘It’s my field. It’s primal, but it’s noble because it speaks to eternity.’
