LEBANON HOUSE

Victoria Khouzami, the first Lebanese student to earn a doctoral degree from the Sorbonne, founded the Franco-Lebanese cultural association (Association culturelle franco-libanaise, ACFL), with the goal of constructing a building in the Cité internationale to house a hundred or so Lebanese graduate and post-graduate students. The Lebanese government lent their financial support in 1959, and the association received private financing for the building’s furnishings. The cornerstone was laid on 24 January 1961. 

Lebanon House was designed by a team of two architects, Jean Vernon and Bruno Philippe, who drafted the plans for a modern building with two wings, which allowed for separate housing for male and female students, as was the case with many of the houses in the Cité internationale constructed before 1968, a year of great change in French society. The two wings include 136 rooms and are connected by a glass-enclosed hallway that gives onto a patio shaded by the branches of a magnificent cedar tree, symbol of that country. On 8 May 1963, Charles Helou, then President of Lebanon, officially opened the doors of the building; only later, in 1969, did it take the name Lebanon House. Thanks to the efforts of the Franco-Lebanese cultural association the difficult civil war that the country has experienced from the 1970s onward has not changed the spirit of open dialogue that the house has always embodied.