The Rachid Karami International Fair Tripoli: The abandoned architectural excess of Lebanon's colonial past

In 1851, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations opened in Hyde Park to an audience of 25,000.

This wasn’t the first of the international trade fairs but the housing of the exhibition in the iconic custom-built Crystal Palace, and the variety of riches on display, triggered imitation events across Europe and the United States.

Yet despite the poet Walt Whitman’s paean to the New York exposition, calling it ‘ampler than any yet, Earth’s modern wonder, history’s seven outstripping,’ the fairs weren’t without issue. 

"The Fair could be said to have suffered a dual curse. Unlike others of the early Fairgrounds which were dismantled or destroyed, it has remained standing to be dealt a slower death by exposure to the elements"

Rather they were extravagantly expensive and, in the interwar period, shifted away from shows of technology and production to instead celebrate colonial excesses.

While many lost money they all drew crowds of awestruck onlookers. Within this lineage, there seems to be no place for the Rachid Karami International Fair site in Tripoli, Lebanon – a partially abandoned and mostly decrepit monument to a futile modernist project.

Troubled origins

In January 2023 UNESCO listed three new world heritage sites in danger and included on that list was the Rachid Karami International Fair. The endangered status of the site will likely result in the provision of funding and conservation opportunities, a success for the embattled country.

However, it is also an indictment of the lack of care taken to protect the location up until this point. This year also saw the inscription of some of the monuments of the Kingdom of Saba in Yemen but where these structures date back 1500-2000 years, work on the Fair site only began in 1967.

The Fair could be said to have suffered a dual curse. Unlike others of the early Fairgrounds which were dismantled or destroyed, it has remained standing to be dealt a slower death by exposure to the elements. And at the inauguration in 1967, contrary to 1850s England or France in 1931, the situation in Lebanon was far from stable.

The story of the Rachid Karami International Fair cannot be told without reference to the Lebanese Civil War. In fact, the site was named for the Prime Minister under whose leadership the Fair was proposed, and who was later to become a casualty of the conflict.

The War began in 1975, eight years into the project before work on the Fair was complete. In the next decade and a half, there were 120,000 casualties in the violence that divided the country, with a further million Lebanese forced to move abroad.

In 1983 there was an effective siege of Tripoli and the pavilions once intended for all the different countries’ stalls instead became strategic touchpoints fought over by brothers from the same nation, as well as various Palestinian, Syrian and Libyan fighters.

The war naturally superseded the completion of the work on the Fair, but it is not the decisive factor in explaining the site’s current predicament. Of the 18 architectural features listed in the submission to UNESCO for the achieving of World Heritage status, 11 are deemed as having ‘critical’ levels of damage.

Were the state to be put on trial for its treatment, a ruling of gross negligence would be assured. Yet the Fair itself, even in this solemn and degraded dress, presents a striking landscape.

Visionary design

Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, famous for his work on Brasília, created to be the new capital of Brazil in 1960, was commissioned to design the fair. Niemeyer, who also contributed plans for the UN headquarters in New York, was provided with total creative freedom over the Tripoli site.

He spent two months exploring the city and then pitched an ambitious drawing based on the creation of a third zone to sit alongside the old centre and the port district.

The third zone would echo the name Tri Polis – three cities - and be based around a vast concrete boomerang-shaped canopy opening towards historic Tripoli. Under the canopy would be located the national pavilions, all fronted by gardens and small ponds.

"Through this lens, the failure to protect the site, or stay true to its socialist intentions, provides an even clearer critique of Lebanon today than it does Lebanon then"

If this wasn’t bold enough, a series of other buildings were to be peppered throughout the ground. Niemeyer envisioned a rotating cinema screen under a concrete dome, a water tank with a rooftop restaurant, and even a helipad-topped space museum, capturing the spirit of the age.

It was a design that was modernist and internationalist but still incorporated some local and Lebanese architectural elements. It’s true that these terms, and the styles in which they are manifest, can seem dated now, however, this was a period when architecture had a socio-cultural purpose.

Furthermore, Lebanon specifically seemed to be at a crossroads where a clear direction, forwards, could be chosen.

Rescuing the failed Fair

Though eclectically styled the Fair drawings and the broader project were underpinned by a philosophy that had recognised an inequality problem in Lebanon that needed solving since at least the 1950s.

The choice of location in the Northern city of Tripoli was part of a deliberate argument to develop other cities in Lebanon, recognising the centralisation in Beirut, and some of the early planning advice came from a research agency that has worked on reducing the social inequality of working-class families in France.

As part of his work, Niemeyer included a collective housing prototype – finished and equipped before the War began – and proposals for new neighbourhoods of social housing and urban infrastructure.

Despite these lofty aims, ultimately and undeniably the Fair is a failure and through it can be seen the divergent faces of Lebanon’s downfall. First, the Lebanese pavilion with its concrete arches was almost finished by 1975 but during the War years and since has had its ornamental elements, everything but the bare bones, in fact, looted.

A visual metaphor for the loss of those years. Second, the model social housing project was sold in 2000 and turned into a hotel. The hotel, of course, has now closed.

Through this lens, the failure to protect the site, or stay true to its socialist intentions, provides an even clearer critique of Lebanon today than it does Lebanon then. Viewed in combination, there is something deeply tragic in these aesthetics of modernity emptied of substance. The disguise of a lack of change. All enshrined for history in real, physical geography.

It was a revolt against this message that underpinned some of the protests that spread through Lebanon in 2019. Though their causes were many and justified, part of the outlet for the protesters took the form of the recapture of lost public space, or the destruction of over-developed properties which were once for the people, like the Beirut Souks.

In a Lebanon that is still reeling, there may be hope for the Rachid Karami International Fair. In March 2022, the parliament adopted a legal framework for the protection of the site previously saved from a planned them park development by the combined efforts of Tripolitan society, academics and public figures.

Funding will need to follow, but if the ‘isolated island inaccessible to the population’ can be reconstituted, its impacts may register as an investment in the future of the country through the protection of its past.

Will Spiers is a policy researcher and writer based in London. Will read history as an undergraduate, then completed a Master's in Political Science at the American University of Beirut