Rachid Karami International Fair

Designed by Oscar Niemeyer in 1962, the Rachid Karami International Fair in Tripoli was conceived as a vast modernist landscape for a new civic vision. Set between the historic city and the port of Al Mina, the 70-hectare site brings together a monumental exhibition hall, experimental theatre, amphitheatre, ceremonial arch, pyramid, Lebanese pavilion, and other sculptural concrete forms arranged within an open park.

Intended as a symbol of Lebanon’s modernization in the 1960s, the project was interrupted by the civil war in 1975 and never fully completed. The fairground remains a suspended city of concrete — part utopia, part ruin — where architecture carries traces of ambition, conflict, abandonment, and memory.

Today, it stands as one of the most significant works of modern architecture in the Middle East, its silent structures still holding the tension between a future imagined and a history that intervened.