Roula Salamoun: Coordinated Senses and the Architecture of Emotion

Designers

13 Nov

Written By Anca Enica

Portrait of Lebanese architect and designer Roula Salamoun. — **people • DESIGNERS**

At Downtown Design Dubai November 2025, Designeers sat down with Lebanese architect and designer Roula Salamoun to discuss her tactile Forum installation, her fascination with form and feeling, and how experimentation drives her multidisciplinary practice.
Amid the hum of Downtown Design Dubai, between installations and the soft clinking of glasses in the Veuve Clicquot Champagne Lounge, we sat down with Roula Salamoun, one of the region’s most distinctive creative voices.
Roula is an architect and designer celebrated for her bold, expressive approach that blurs the boundaries between art, architecture, and storytelling. Through her Beirut studio, she creates immersive spaces and sculptural objects that explore materiality, memory, and emotion. Her work spans residential and cultural projects to collectible design pieces and has appeared at PAD Paris, London Art Week, NOMAD St. Moritz, and We Design Beirut. She is represented by Galerie Gosserez in Paris, which regularly exhibits her Archipelago and Strata series.

Words: designeers
NOVEMBER 2025

WEBSITE: roulasalamoun.com
INSTAGRAM: @roula.salamoun

Coordinated Senses

Roula’s talk at this year’s fair, “Coordinated Senses,” became the starting point for our exchange. The phrase captures her belief that design should engage the full range of human perception. Her inspirations come not only from architecture but also from the anatomy of the human body and the shifting landscapes of nature, both constant studies in balance, erosion, and renewal.

Her workshop in Beirut reflects that philosophy: a hands-on, experimental laboratory filled with clay, plaster, and prototypes. “It’s closer to a sculptor’s den than an architectural office,” she said with a smile. “I like to work through touch, to understand a material’s resistance, its rhythm, its story.”

The Forum as a Living Organism

At Downtown Design, Roula was invited to design the fair’s Forum space, the beating heart of its dialogue and exchange. She conceived it not as a stage but as a tactile landscape, cocooning and inclusive, where speakers and audiences could meet on equal ground.

“I wanted to remove the idea of formality,” she explained. “To make people feel comfortable enough to sit however they wish, to inhabit the space playfully.”

The result was one of the fair’s most memorable installations: an earthy amphitheatre of curved forms and warm textures that encouraged presence rather than performance. It embodied her gift for turning architecture into emotion, a structure that invited the body to respond instinctively.

Design as Emotion

Roula approaches design as a conversation between material and memory. “We often design for how things look,” she reflected, “but I’m more interested in how things feel, in the hand, in the atmosphere, in the subconscious.”

Her pieces, cast in resin, bronze, or stone, echo natural and anatomical formations: the swell of a ridge, the fold of skin, and the sediment of time. Each work reveals a fascination with texture and transformation and a refusal to separate the conceptual from the tactile.

This tension between control and instinct runs through all her work. “I’m not looking for perfection,” she said. “I’m looking for presence, that moment when a piece feels alive.”

“We often design for how things look, but I’m more interested in how things feel, in the hand, in the atmosphere, in the subconscious.”

Roula Salamoun

A Worldly Practice

Roula’s career charts an impressive international path. From Beirut Design Week and Beirut Art Center to PAD Paris, London Art Week, NOMAD St. Moritz, and Downtown Design Riyadh, her pieces, including the Archipelago seats, Strata carpets, and Anatomy consoles, have been exhibited by leading galleries and cultural platforms worldwide.

Each setting expands her dialogue between art and architecture, between the intimacy of craft and the scale of the built environment. Through it all, Beirut remains her anchor. “It’s a city that teaches you to improvise,” she said. “Nothing is fixed; everything is layered. That’s where my curiosity comes from.”

A Coordinated Future

In an age increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, Roula’s process stands deliberately apart. She doesn’t rely on AI tools or digital simulations, choosing instead to work directly with materials, hands, and intuition. “Technology can analyse,” she said, “but it can’t feel.”

Her “Coordinated Senses” philosophy is therefore an antidote to automation: a focus on empathy, imperfection, and the intelligence of the hand. Her Forum installation at Downtown Design was not just a space for dialogue; it was a meditation on the physical act of making, urging us to experience design as something organic and alive.

By grounding form in emotion and craftsmanship in curiosity, she reminds us that beauty is not static. It evolves, breathes, and invites us to reach out and touch it.