www.dailystar.com The design scheme that took second prize in the international ideas competition for Martyrs' Square, that vast public space occupying the geographic and symbolic heart of Beirut, presents a curious combination of bold and conciliatory gestures. A reflecting pool around the Martyrs' Statue gives it a serene, Zen-like core. A wide tree-lined pedestrian promenade suggests an active, user-friendly plaza. The real strength of the plan, however, lies in its powerful, almost aggressive trajectory shooting straight out to the sea, a move fully embracing the idea (long championed by Solidere, the competition's sponsor) that Beirut has finally opened a gateway between the old Bourj and the Mediterranean.

That scheme, produced by Nabil Gholam with Vladimir Djurovic and Vincent Van Duysen, may not have won in the end. But it carries all the key elements that have become characteristic of Gholam's architectural practice. The hometown loss in the Martyrs' Square competition notwithstanding, those elements - among them simplicity, elegance, flexibility, respect, daring, and environmental responsibility - are precisely those that are now paving the way for Gholam's expansion.

In January, he named seven employees to be associates in his firm. He is currently in the final stages of preparing a second office in Barcelona. And he is branching out and diversifying his work geographically, to the extent that 60 to 70 percent of his projects are now unfolding outside of Lebanon.

"Istanbul is very interesting for us," he says. "Barcelona is very interesting for us." High-end residential developments in the U.K. and Belgium are posing fine challenges to his versatility and adaptability, testing the strength of the Mediterranean flavor that seeps into everything he does. But perhaps most interesting of all are the six projects Gholam has lined up in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

It's no secret that money and the astonishing pace of construction have made the Gulf a lucrative place to work and, in many respects, an unprecedented stomping ground for architects, both established and emerging. Gholam got into the game relatively early in Dubai - about five years ago - with a residential complex for EMAAR, where 180 apartments sold out in just 70 hours.

"We didn't pursue that," says Gholam. "We didn't want pure commercial work or the stuff where money is no object. It's become a very competitive market and now there are established firms that give them what they want."

Gholam has chosen a rather more difficult and paradoxical path, leaving the freewheeling, forgiving lifestyle of Dubai behind and tackling contexts that require greater sensitivity to conservative social, political, and religious norms. The Gulf may not be the most obvious place to push flexibility or energy efficiency. Yet that is exactly what Gholam is doing.

"I like paradoxes," he says. "I think that there are very interesting things to find on the edges of contradictions."

Over the next few years, Gholam is finalizing an ecologically sound shopping mall in Qatar called the Doha Souks, replete with a densely landscaped green atrium that creates an artificial cloud capable of producing rain for cooling and climate control. In Saudi Arabia, he is working on three massive mixed-use and residential complexes, including the Doha Gardens near Dammam, which is characterized by decidedly modern apartments with mobile partitions, allowing families to open up or divide off their private dwelling spaces as needed. (Gholam's ability to achieve gradations of privacy allows for a separation of the sexes, if required, without sacrificing access to the view, the sea, the breeze, or the sun.)

"You are always catalyzing something. It's really about finding the closest and best way to optimize an existing model, and trying to root it in something that already exists in the culture," he explains. "I don't think you're going to create a completely new model. But you're going to merge some of the most interesting aspects respectfully, and daringly sometimes, as far as you can go."

What is also striking about these projects is their duality of scale. On the one hand, Gholam is devising schemes for huge projects, veritable mini-cities of 1 to 3 million square meters, with housing units, business districts, and provisions for educational, leisure, and religious activities, as with the Al-Fanar project situated between Dammam and Al-Khobar. On the other hand, he is addressing the way people live in their homes on the most intimate level.

"It's obviously at the same time very exhilarating and very humbling," he says. "We always try to learn from the mistakes that have been done in the past, from the shortcomings of the modern movement and the postmodern movement and all the sort of deconstructed things that followed. We try, at the same time, to merge in a very personal way [our] teachings that are usually coming from the West and from our Mediterranean culture in Lebanon, and enrich these based on what [we] know of the culture."

Regarding the time he has been spending in the Gulf for research, he adds: "The first thing that strikes you there is that the younger generation - and sometimes there are exceptions among the older generation - are really keen to see some of the values of their society protected, while at the same time, and sometimes paradoxically so, they are craving change to a great degree. To be a bit more practical, not every person you meet in Saudi Arabia would like to have four wives, nor is every person you meet willing to see his wife without a veil, walking in the street. So you have to try to conciliate all these things, at the scale of a house and it goes all the way up to the city - because as it gets more anonymous and more large scale, it's somewhat easier because the businesses and the drive of the city and the way of life people are aspiring to all tend toward different types of Western models that we can understand."

Gholam maintains that, in designing for the Gulf or grappling with the limitations called for by strict adherence to Islam, the questions that come up are the same as they are anywhere - how to avoid poverty rings around cities, how to mitigate sprawl around American-style low-rise suburban residential developments (which are incidentally among the most popular design choices in Saudi Arabia) linked together by big highways.

"Depending on the situation, you have to adapt," says Gholam. He suggests that the main differences in Saudi Arabia may be the answers to such questions as, "How do people live in their houses? How do they welcome their friends? What do they do in their gardens? How well will they adapt to a high-rise building when they are so used to privacy? These create design criteria and design objectives that you have to literally write, custom-made, for each project."

Moreover, Gholam's Gulf projects are, each in their own way, incredibly multifaceted. The Doha Souks, for example, is a hinge on which an ambitious regeneration effort for downtown Doha will turn. It is meant to be a catalyst for the rest of the neighborhood, Gholam explains, an attempt to jumpstart the surrounding economy gently rather than violently. Al-Fanar, too, is bound to a plan for consolidating the business districts in Dammam and Al-Khobar.

"Don't forget, these are commercial developments," he adds. "They will have to turn into effective, economical, buildable, and successful solutions for the developer. That's another part of the challenge."

Yet another is the fact that for the residential projects, Gholam and his team are, for the first time, required to design mosques. "It's not easy to find the appropriate vocabulary in the modern idiom," he says, especially given the weight and spiritual power of, say, Sinan's mosques in Istanbul.

Experiments in urban planning and religious edifice aside, the residential nature of Gholam's projects in the Gulf highlights an important issue.

In an essay entitled "The Architecture of Housing," written for the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Ismail Serageldin notes that issues of housing - from shortages to the degradation of building stock and a lack of imaginative design alternatives to tower blocks - constitutes one of the most pressing problems in the contemporary Muslim world. "Housing contributes as much as 65 percent of the built-up areas in our cities today. And our cities are growing by 4 to 8 percent per annum. The future of the built environment of Muslims, not only the quality of their shelter, is at stake." Poverty, no doubt, compounds the problem and as such, mass produced, low-income projects may be the sort most crucially needed. Yet Serageldin argues that high-end homes for the rich (the category under which Gholam's projects inevitably fall) are no less relevant, providing "the best vehicles both for artistic expression and for enriching society."