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PSLab

Beirut, LB

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NOK Yoga Center - Beirut

Housed in an eighteenth century stone arcade in Beirut's Saifi Village, the NOK Yoga center is a non-profit community space that provides a place for meditation and the study of Eastern religion, philosophy and yoga. Its intimate vaulted structure looks out to a private courtyard and a pedestrian street. This duality of intimate versus open is in the DNA of NOK Yoga center. As a service center, focused on providing a sense of peace, health and wellbeing, its core position is the mediator of comfort. However, this outreach does not compromise its privacy.

PSLab's work with NOK was based on the spatial and functional aspects of transparency and intimacy in a mediation space. It was about being present and not present at the same time - to design products in space that compliment its bare flow. Starting from an emphasis on the response to the space, PSLab decided to tuck their insertions on its peripheries. Nothing was to be mounted on any central space to leave it uninterrupted.

PSLab created wall-mounted platform modules at two levels, upper level modules acting as shelves and lower ones as counters catering to people seated on the ground. These platforms are lit with tubular elements ending with exposed light bulbs.

Another type of wall-mounted unit is the candleholder. It shares the tubular lighting fixtures with the rest of the wall units, but differs in the shelving structure. Made of three levels, each platform is made to hold three candles with alternating positions as not to be impacted by the heat below.

The heights and curvatures of the tubes are based on the heights of the stone arcades of the space.

The thick walls and arcades in the main area create offsets in the space. These offsets generate small outward facing nooks. Along the arcades, PSLab installed aligned steel rods that are designed to suspend curtains for privacy and mount lighting fixtures of steel with a blackened copper finish. The visual continuity created by the gaps that interrupt the curtains maintains secluded nooks as part of the main space. 

 
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Status: Built
Location: Beirut, LB
Firm Role: lighting design and manufactoring