Preservation and innovation

Executive caught up with Tarek Mitri weeks after his appointment as the director of Issam Fares Institute (IFI) at the American University of Beirut. Sitting in his office in IFI, a building whose design he says he is not very fond of, Mitri talks about plans for Sursock Museum’s reopening, the cultural and artistic scene in Beirut, as well as his new post.   As the chairman of Sursock Museum’s Board of Directors, can you tell us how the Sursock project is coming along? We are hoping to inaugurate it in spring 2015. It took us more time than expected as it was far more expensive than we had projected, but that’s not the only reason. It had to do also with the fact that we had a famous French architect, Jean-Michel Wilmotte, who lives in France and so getting things done under his supervision here understandably delayed the inauguration