ABSTRACT
By revisiting a forgotten masterpiece of high-modern architecture in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, this chapter sets out to demonstrate the inherent formal plasticity of the various scalar problems that inform the urban project, using its seeming unity to suggest a contradictory and often paradoxical set of design rationalities that seem to co-exist within the project. These scalar problems are understood as fully historical forms of reasoning that came into being during a period of nation building in the 1950s and 1960s in Lebanon, before being radically transformed by the evisceration of a nascent welfare state, its replacement by a laissez faire economy, and then finally by the eventual impact of the civil war.
