Niemeyer's Buildings Mark Happier Times Before Lebanon's Civil War

Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Amid the chaos and conflict in the Middle East, there's still some strange and beautiful places to be found. Decades ago, Lebanon was more peaceful and cosmopolitan than it is today, and it was graced with the work of the famous architect Oscar Niemeyer. In this encore presentation, NPR's Alice Fordham visits one of Niemeyer's modernist buildings, a curious relic of happier times.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

ALICE FORDHAM, BYLINE: Lebanon's northern city of Tripoli is known for Arabic sweets, intermittent sectarian violence and Oriental architecture, so it's a jolt to step into a park with kids playing around a series of sweeping, white, curved buildings.

MIRA MINKARA: This space, from there until the end, is the space of the exhibition.

FORDHAM: I'm on a walking tour led by Mira Minkara, a Tripoli native, at an international fairground. It was designed by the late Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. In 250 acres of blossoming garden, there's the exhibition space, a pavilion with tapering columns and undulating walls and a vast, slender arch towering over it all.

MINKARA: He didn't like borders. He didn't like limits. The inside and outside are all, like, mixed together, and that's exactly what he wanted to do.

FORDHAM: It was finished in 1974, just as Lebanon's bloody 15-year civil war broke out and was never used for its original purpose. But the structures remain. Minkara leads us into an underground space domed with smooth exposed concrete.

MINKARA: Basically, this is the experimental theatre.

FORDHAM: It wasn't meant to echo like this. The acoustics were never finished. But artists and musicians like to record here. And a group of visiting children runs riot.

The fairground was also caught up in the civil war. When Syrian troops intervened, they used it as a base.

MINKARA: Actually, the tanks of the Syrians were all over here. And actually, the Syrians were living in these buildings.

FORDHAM: Minkara points out an underground space and a wall spattered with bullet holes.

MINKARA: They could do anything they want - probably down was the torture places, like where they took the detainee and tortured them. And this is the execution wall.

FORDHAM: Most of the visitors are Lebanese and say they were surprised by the scale of this little-known architectural wonder. The tour group heads to a lively cafe for a hummus lunch. One of them, Yolande Farhad, says she was nervous to come to Tripoli because of the fighting that sometimes breaks out here.

YOLANDE FARHAD: It's really interesting to come, but really, I'm afraid to come alone.

FORDHAM: But she loved the fairground. Her brother, William, lived in the U.S. for 20 years and wishes the fairground was still in use, like the site of the 1961 World's Fair in Seattle.

WILLIAM: I was really brokenhearted, to be honest with you.

FORDHAM: The park isn't open to the general public, but the U.N. uses it for children's events. The city threw a festival there. Tens of thousands of people partied under that huge, graceful arch while fireworks burst into light above it. Alice Fordham, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.