The Rachid Karami International Fair in Tripoli, located in northern Lebanon, was designed in 1962 by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer on a 70-hectare site between Tripoli’s historic center and the port of Al Mina. The main building of the fair consists of a huge covered bumerang-shaped pavilion measuring 750 meters by 70 meters, a flexible space for countries to set up exhibitions. The fair was the flagship project of Lebanon’s modernization policy in the 1960s. The close collaboration between Oscar Niemeyer, the project’s architect, and Lebanese engineers resulted in a remarkable example of exchange between different continents. In scale and richness of formal expression, it represents one of the major representative works of 20th-century modern architecture in the Arab Near East.
