YTAA - Youssef Tohme Architects and Associates

General information

YTAA - About Us

Over the years, the practice has pioneered a unique form of architectural exchange between Beirut and the world. It’s an exchange that continues to keep us connected to the development of future projects.

The Way We Work

Through a perpetual examination of what the true basis of a building is, the practice experiments with materials that have many faces. Our experimentation with materials and context delivers buildings that do not remain static, but instead that evolve and transform with time and as they are inhabited.

It is our reflection on, and interpretation of, different contexts and our vision of how these contexts work together that defines YTAA.

Our work is more about the experience of living the project than merely defining the shape of it. We create an experience that empowers the visitor rather than empowers us as architects.

The Team

Working with consultants from within Lebanon as well as globally, it is our Beirut home that shapes us. The city and country are permanently in a state of creation and have long been at the center of shaping other societies as well as our own. We’re part of a society that has developed sensitivity and adaptability, in particular in regard to location and culture.

Youssef Tohme
Founder, Name Partner and Architect

Graduated from the Paris-Villemin School of Architecture where he taught theory after graduating in 1997, Youssef Tohme worked between 2000 and 2006 in several Parisian agencies including the agency AJN (Ateliers Jean Nouvel). Meanwhile, he leads private projects in Lebanon in association with the agency 109 architectes including the ‘Campus de l’innovation, de l’économie et du sport (USJ)’ in Beirut. Winner of the Young Arab Architects Competition (CA'ASI, Institute of the Arab World, Paris, 2012), the jury mentions: "In Youssef Tohme’s projects ... he shows us how the symbiosis between tradition and modernity can redefine the architectural space, gives it a breath, yet precisely marked by innovation.”

In 2008, he founded Y.Tohme / Architects in Beirut. Surrounded by a team of Lebanese and international architects, he aims to articulate his theoretical and technical research with his practice in the context of architectural and urban projects. According to Youssef Tohme, "The horizon, the atmosphere, the fragment, the in-between, the mobility, the envelope, the silence, and the landscape are all topics that the agency is studying to develop its projects. The architecture that touches us speaks of the world in which we live. We try to understand this world in a social, economic, political and philosophical way. Reflections on society, territory, and writing arouse our interests: we question their relationships and try to reinterpret the architecture, to appropriate it, to adapt it. "We speak rather of habitation structures, relations, uses, atmosphere, appropriation, and not of houses such as Villa T, Villa SC, and Villa M ... and questioning about programs and contexts such as the disaster center of the BLF Bank, a residential tower in downtown A599, a resort by the sea HAT, and the new headquarters of PSLAB in Beirut.

On the international scale, a number of cultural, residential and urban buildings are under development such as MARe 'Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art Romania in Bucharest, ALZORAH Marina Square residential complex in Ajman, or Cambridge School in Bucharest.

In 2012, he opens YTAA – Youssef Tohme Architects and Associates along with Roger Akoury and Anastasia Elrouss. The team wins the urban planning competition launched by the Bordeaux Municipality for the redevelopment of the Brazza Nord district, a former industrial wasteland of sixty hectares. In this project, the agency worked on the concept of the unforeseen in the formation and evolution of a district, and on the concept of landscape as urban infrastructure as well as on the concept of ‘Volumes Capables’ and several types of habitats as the essence forming the identity of Brazza.

In 2013, Youssef Tohme was appointed the curator of Agora 2014, a Biennial of Urban Planning and Design Architecture which took place in Bordeaux in September 2014 and which raises the question of public space. Meanwhile, he publishes the book 'Intensive Beirut', an illustrated essay that mixes urban reflections on the Lebanese capital to the experiences of the agency's projects, committed to reopening the debate on the architecture in Lebanon.

In 2015, he was awarded "La médaille de l’urbanisme" of the Academy of Architecture of France for his work around the Bordeaux region.

In 2016, YTAA wins the development of 120 units housing project in Nantes, France including an 11-floors wooden tower.

Roger Akoury
Partner, Curator and Entrepreneur

Roger is a successful entrepreneur with business interests in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. A founding partner at YTAA since the firm’s establishment in 2008, he currently divides his time between managing projects on both continents and is also co-founder of the KA Modern and Contemporary Art Space in Lebanon.

“Architecture must first deliver on its purpose. At its heart architecture must be the creation of something practical – if it isn’t this then it is purely art. Once it is established as practical, then the experimentation can become part of the design. I’m currently closely involved in the creation of a Museum of Modern Art in Bucharest. This is a perfect example of relevant and contextual architecture. Within a historic building we’re creating a contemporary space by combining our knowledge with the latest design and construction techniques.