Inside the Lebanese guest house that won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture

The renovation project in Tripoli will share the $1 million prize with five other winners from around the world

The Niemeyer Guest House in Tripoli, Lebanon has been named one of the six winners of the 2022 Aga Khan Award for Architecture. All photos: Cemal Emden / Aga Khan Trust for Culture

Since its opening, the guest house has hosted several shows and promotes collaborations between established Lebanese designers and local artisans.

The outdoor space of the Niemeyer Guest House.

The central atrium surrounded by the exhibition space, where furniture samples are tested and made available for public use.

A paved concrete pathway leads the visitors discreetly towards the building entrance.

Minjara, as the guest house is now called, offers access, free of charge, to a state-of-the-art carpentry workshop.

Conceived as an open production laboratory, the workshop and its auxiliary technical spaces infiltrate the western wing of the building.

All furniture used and displayed in the guest house is entirely designed and built at the Minjara workshop.

The blank facades reveal a beautiful interior space lit by a square atrium.

The concrete diagrid covering the courtyards allows sunlight to enter the interior spaces without glare.

The building is centred around an open central atrium planted with local reed species.

The guest house's glass doors can be opened or closed depending on privacy needs and the desire to access the courtyard.

A view of the guest house's surroundings and material library.

The horizontal concrete structure with a windowless facade.

The central courtyard with new glazed partitions.

Defined by a series of lightweight steel and glass panels registering the ceiling's rhythmic structural grid, the new flexible partition seamlessly connects all functions to each other and to the central courtyard beyond.

The guest house exposes an elongated profile with its 58-metre main facade, of low height, set on a flat field amid lush green grass.

The Niemeyer Guest House is now a design platform and production centre for the local wood industry.

The guest house plan. Photo: East Architecture Studio

In 1964, construction began on an ambitious permanent international fair in Tripoli, Lebanon's second largest city. The plan, according to then president Fouad Chehab, was to turn the port city into an international economic hub to supplement Beirut's growth.

Named the Rachid Karami International Fair, after the country's long-serving prime minister, the 40-hectare attraction was meant to accommodate up to two million visitors a year and included a grand exhibition hall, a national pavilion and an outdoor concert stage among others.

Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, considered one of the foremost names in modernist architecture, designed the masterplan and it was scheduled for opening in 1969.

But progress on the large-scale project soon stalled, initially delayed by funding issues and then by the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. Following successive wars and an Israeli invasion in 1982, work on the fair was permanently halted, leaving the complex abandoned for years.

In 2018, following local initiatives to revive and protect the project, the fair was added to Unesco’s World Heritage tentative list. Since then, a number of projects have been funded by international organisations to renovate parts of it.

One such project, which involved the restoration of a guest house within the complex, was named as one of the six winners of the $1 million Aga Khan Award for Architecture on Thursday.

The first prizes were announced in 1978 with further ceremonies running every three years. It is the 15th time the awards have been held. The awards were instituted by the Aga Khan to reward building projects and designs that address the needs of communities with significant Muslim populations.

Scroll through the gallery above for more pictures of the Niemeyer guest house project

Funded by development and aid agency Expertise France, the renovation project adopted a 1,500 square metre space within the complex and turned it into a design platform and production facility. Called Minjara, the space was inaugurated in 2018 and is meant to be a space for suppliers, producers and designers of furniture, an industry Tripoli was once famed for.

Lebanese collective East Architecture Studio was tasked with the project.

Co-founder Charles Kettaneh said much of the budget for the project was spent renovating Niemeyer's existing structure.

"The responsibility for us was to set a valid precedent that was respectful of the history of the fair, of the world of Oscar Niemeyer in our intervention so that it could be a good restarting point, a rebirth of the pavilion," he says in a video explaining the project.

Kettaneh's colleague Nicolas Fayad explains that it was important for the project to be "reversible". He adds how they could imagine the design "being completely taken away" if the programme of the building changes in the future.

The transformation of the guest house has further boosted the stature of the entire site and re-energised calls for its protection.

"The renovation of the Niemeyer Guest House is an inspiring tale of architecture’s capacity for repair, at a time of dizzying, entangled crisis around the world, and in Lebanon in particular, as the country faces unprecedented political, socio-economic and environmental collapse," the jury for the 2022 Aga Khan Award for Architecture said.

The Tripoli project will share the prize with five other winners, including two community spaces in Bangladesh, the Banyuwangi International Airport in Indonesia, the Argo Contemporary Art Museum and Cultural Centre in Iran and the Kamanar Secondary School in Senegal.

The winners were chosen from a shortlist of 20, which were whittled down from a pool of 463. On-site reviews by a team of experts were undertaken to devise the final list.

In the Gulf, Sharjah's restored Flying Saucer was one of the shortlisted projects, alongside the Manama Post Office in Bahrain and the Wafra Wind Tower in Kuwait.

An award ceremony will soon take place in Muscat, Oman, in conjunction with the Aga Khan Music Awards.

Scroll through the gallery below for pictures of the six winners of the 2022 Aga Khan Award for Architecture