Hala Wardé: From the Accident of the Museum to the Museum of the Accident

Born in Lebanon in 1965, Hala Wardé graduated from the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture de Paris where she studied with Paul Virilio, Bernard Tschumi and Jean Nouvel with whom she collaborated for more than 20 years. In 2008, Hala Wardé created her agency, HW architecture. She realized the project of One New Change in London, inaugurated at the end of 2010, as well as the project of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which she directed since its conception in 2006 and delivered in 2017. In 2016, Hala Wardé won a competition to provide the Lebanese capital with a new museum of modern and contemporary art: the Beirut Museum of Art or BeMA. In 2018, Hala Wardé was selected to design and build Le Mirabeau, a landmark tower that will be part of the maritime district and the new skyline of Marseille. Curator of the Lebanese Pavilion at the 2021 Venice International Architecture Biennale, she presented “A Roof for Silence”, an architectural and cultural project that will begin its itinerancy in 2022. In parallel, Hala Wardé regularly collaborates with artists for specific interventions related to architecture, such as Guiseppe Penone, Etel Adnan, or Nan Goldin for the exhibition “Visible/Invisible” at the Château de Versailles and soon for a retrospective of her work in collaboration with the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.