The third installment in the Dongola Architecture Series, Provoking the Territory: Bernard Khoury, explores the provocative and often polarizing practice of Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury through an intimate lens rooted in Beirut. As with previous volumes, the series privileges critical conversations over monographic celebration—this edition not only follows Khoury’s trajectory from student to self-reinvention in his fifties, but also presents him as both a product and provocateur of the city’s contradictions.

This volume uses Khoury’s work not simply as an archive of built projects, but as an investigative framework for understanding Beirut’s urban complexities. It asks: how can an architect simultaneously challenge power and profit from it? Can one critically portray a city while being embedded in its elite networks?

Following the structure of earlier volumes—Critical Encounters with Nasser Rabbat and Notes on Formation with Ammar Khammash—Provoking the Territory mobilizes Khoury’s thinking as a lens to reflect on regional failures to modernize, unlearn dominant fictions, and dive fearlessly into the architectural imaginaries of the Arab world. It is an invitation to confront the ethics, politics, and aesthetics of urban storytelling.