Operating at the intersection of architecture, social innovation, design, and film, the Beirut-based studio will unveil several new projects in 2019.
Tessa and Tara Sakhi, Photo by Alain Sauma, Courtesy of T SAKHI.
A R T Communication + Brand Consultancy is delighted to announce the representation of T SAKHI, a multidisciplinary architecture and design studio cofounded by Lebanese-Polish sisters Tessa and Tara Sakhi. Like Beirut’s hybrid identity, the studio fuses a multitude of creative practices to incite alternate modes of social interactions, whether through space or objects. T SAKHI’s designs are both permanent and impermanent, responding to both the city’s need for new adaptable structures as well as stability.
Operating nomadically between Milan, Beirut, and Paris, projects range from residential and commercial architecture, art objects, functional product designs, urban installations, and films reflecting on the nature of our current social fabric. The sister’s architecture and urban designs recognize the ephemerality of spaces that contemporary life requires. Enabling numerous spatial configurations, the studio allows for intimacy in both public and private space, as the sisters place humanity at the center of their practice.
In 2019, T SAKHI will unveil a diverse series of dynamic projects experimenting with materiality and the cross-cultural nuances of living and leisure spaces. Upcoming projects include a line of Murano crafted glass vases upcycling metal waste, exhibiting at “1000 Vases” in Paris, residential lofts in Milan and Beirut, the interactive performance “Toyota 89,” and “ADAR,” a Mediterranean Épicerie and Traiteur in Paris. In their rendition of the Mediterranean restaurant, they subtly capture the culture without falling into clichés of Orientalism and grandiosity, using warm earthy colors and a central chandelier comprised of local dried spices and vegetables, evoking the souk.
The studio’s past projects include “Fleeting Hearts,” a dismountable nightclub in Beirut subverting social structures, “Present Actions. Past Reactions,” a residence harmonizing communal aspects of traditional Lebanese homes with modernity, “Silent Echoes,” a dining installation that questions the social act in the era of social media, and “Holidays in the Sun,” a series of adapted security barriers installed in Beirut. The whimsical barriers are reinterpreted into a socially conscious intervention and present a solution to the lack of greenery and seating areas in public spaces.
T SAKHI regularly collaborates with artists and craftsmen from all over the world. From the glass masters of Laguna B in Murano, the stone sculptors of Marmonil in Cairo, to Lebanese directors and musicians such as Mounia Akl and Petra Serhal, T SAKHI’s collaborations are just as diverse as their work. Similarly, in their ensuing films, T SAKHI invites directors, musicians, writers, and fashion designers to interact with their architecture and designs, creating an additional, synergetic layer of music and fashion