Knowledge & Innovation Center
international competition
Rachid Karami International Fair (designed by Oscar Niemeyer)
Tripoli - Lebanon
2019
Set within a context home to a unique modernist masterpiece, the KIC shall be a technology park like no other and stay true to Oscar Niemeyer’s initial vision of a place of social integration open to all.
Envisioned as a seamlessly embedded part of the whole RKIF site, the project is designed as an inhabited green park and aims to be an absolute fusion of architecture and landscape.
Combining a subterranean architecture with an aspiration to a “degree zero” in its expression to highlight the existing tonic structures, the design also adopts Oscar Niemeyer’s distinct binary opposition as a compositional system throughout the whole scheme:
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Reproducing the harmony of a natural ecosystem, the project is a combination of synthetic and biological, active and passive, technological and natural systems working in synergy.
Structured by the void, the project thus displays a series of connected underground open spaces that kindle people’s interactions and form the canvas for inspirational workplaces.
Remaining at all times the art of transforming quantitative to sensorial, it is the project’s aspiration to be delicately infused with Niemeyer’s spirit, architectural purity, constructive discipline, distinctive spatial experiences, binary opposition principles while never disrupting the eloquent existing structures and the integrity of the site.
in fine, it is the project’s greatest ambition to live up to Niemeyer’s legacy by being the coda to his unfinished symphony