The selection of a design for the new Beirut Museum of Art building marks an important step forward for women in the Middle East and in the Lebanese cultural scene. In December 2018, the museum announced that the winning design was from WORKac, a New York-based firm co-founded by Beirut-born architect Amale Andraos.

Andraos, currently the dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, co-founded WORKac with her partner, Dan Wood. The museum design developed by WORKac will sit atop a section of Beirut that was once part of the Green Line, the demarcation point between various factions of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990).

"We are confident that WORKac's design will create an inspiring space for our visitors, exhibitions and programming," Joe Saddi, executive president of the Board of Trustees of BeMA (Beirut Museum of Art), told Al-Monitor. He added, “BeMA’s core mission is to be a site of dialogue and discussion among diverse communities in Lebanon, an aim that is both expressed philosophically and concretely facilitated through the porous surface and staggered galleries of WORKac’s design.”

The new museum is a democratized space and features a honeycombed exterior that also seems to invoke the muqarnas — a type of ornamental vaulting found in traditional architecture across the region. This allows the building to feature more than 70 balconies, some of which will be open to the public and others that will serve as working spaces. The building will feature 2,700-square-meters of dedicated exhibition space to present the work of contemporary artwork from Lebanon and artwork generated by Lebanese in the diaspora.