On the 35-year-old architect's desk lies a red cloth three-ring binder detailing his firm's design plans for the much-loved and much-hated domed building in downtown Beirut: an old, disused movie theater known variously as the egg, the bubble, the blob, or by its official name - the Beirut City Center Building.Pockmarked by years of war and stranded by decades of structural neglect, the dome is a stark visual icon, instantly recognizable as an emblem of 1960s-era modernist architecture, a relic of Beirut's bustling past, an object lesson in the city's tempestuous political history.Khoury plans to liberate the shell of the building from its concrete slabs and brace it with two-meter-wide scaffolding on all sides to hold its ravaged skin intact. As such, the dome will become an entirely different icon, a ruthlessly contemporary building housing an unprecedented hybrid of commercial and cultural life, an attempt to encapsulate the city in flux, now and in the present tense, all young, energetic, adventurous and risky.
