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French architect Jean-Marc Bonfils perishes in Beirut explosion

2020-08-06T11:13:38.578Z


He was filming the fire live, from his apartment in one of the towers he had signed, when the blast of the explosion fatally injured him. Internationally renowned, he was working to transform his hometown.


He left with part of his work, to his city of heart, Beirut. The architect Jean-Marc Bonfils was in his apartment, in a building he had designed himself and for which he had received an international award, when a first detonation occurred on Tuesday evening. The daily L'Orient-Le Jour reports that he was filming the fire in the port's shops live on Facebook when it was swept away by the second explosion.

Ghassan Hajjar, one of his Lebanese friends, tells LCI how he went in search of the architect in the East Village tower, rue Armenia, in the Mar Mikhaël district, one of the most prominent of the capital but also one of the closest to the port and the heart of the explosion. “It was total chaos in the building, water was everywhere on the stairs. The fire doors were exploded, ”he recounts. The emergency services find Jean-Marc Bonfils in his kitchen, under piles of furniture and debris, living according to witnesses. Transferred to the emergency room of the American hospital where he was pronounced dead a few hours later. Ghassan Hajjar describes him as "a beautiful soul, a brilliant man, a renowned architect in Lebanon" .

Read also: Explosions in Beirut: a new report shows at least 137 dead and 5,000 injured

Born in Beirut in 1963, son of an architect, Jean-Marc Bonfils went to study in France where he graduated from the Paris-Villemin School of Architecture in 1987. Very attached to the notion of heritage, he also studies history of art at the Louvre School. He worked for ten years in the French capital before winning an international architectural competition which brought him back to his native country in 1995. In France, he took part in major development projects such as Greenpark, the largest “Gulf”. -European State, comprising three golf courses, two hotels and 900 individual houses.

Beirut, his beloved

Beirut is “a city of paradoxes and paradigms, of different realities that meet and separate. It is important to see this when we are working on the construction of a building here ” , wrote Jean-Marc Bonfils in Architecture today . Guided by a philosophical approach to his profession, he had taken part in projects to restore buildings destroyed by war and was marked by the experience of "the force of the void" inherent in these demolished spaces. The man chose projects that made sense.

Among his achievements that have transformed the city: the landscaping of the central district of the coastal capital or the National Library of Lebanon.

Its "East Village", a contemporary reinterpretation of traditional Lebanese architecture, is one of the most exclusive buildings in the Mar Mikhaël district, "beating heart" of the Lebanese capital. Admired by tourists and locals who never fail to photograph him, he offers a good overview of his work due to the narrowness of the site and the design of the wooden building, decorated with a vertical garden.

The “East Village” is one of its most spectacular buildings. It combines contemporary and traditional architecture. Instagram capture Jean-Marc Bonfils

I am a resolutely contemporary architect, but I place myself at the meeting between the modern and the ancestral. You can be a convinced modernist by taking into account the past and the present of a place, ”he explains in an interview for the Cultural Agenda .

It is also in Beirut that he transmits his passion for architecture as a teacher at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts but also at the American University of Beirut.

The Minister of Culture Roselyne Bachelot paid tribute to this artist, imbued with two cultures, on Twitter, indicating that " France and Lebanon are united in the sorrow of his death."

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2020-08-06

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