One day in 1962, Oscar Niemeyer found himself strapped into the seat of a helicopter thundering over a tract of land on the outskirts of Tripoli, Lebanon. After two circuits over the city, the nervous architect (Niemeyer hated flying) told his project manager, “OK, we can go back. I’ve decided the best location for the fair.” At the time, the Brazilian architect was riding the wave of success from his work in Brasilia, the new capital of his home country. Niemeyer’s revolutionary designs had spurred a flurry of interest from international clients, among them the Lebanese, who gave him nearly 250 acres of land to design the grounds for a grand World’s Fair meant to showcase the country’s development and innovation.
The architect completed his plans in 1963, including a wild array of concrete structures that incorporated elements of traditional Arab style into the distinctly modern aesthetic he perfected in Brasilia: a mushroom-shaped helipad over a subterranean science museum, a concrete dome housing an experimental theater, pyramid structures with star-shaped footprints, and a boomerang-like “Grand Ouverture”—the main exhibition hall. Construction began in 1967, but the outbreak of Lebanon’s civil war in 1975 brought the slow-moving project to a halt.
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