Poland in Lebanon

Karol Schayer (25.12.1900 – 15.03.1971) was a modernist Polish architect who designed many buildings in Poland and Lebanon.

Born in Lviv in 1900, he left Poland with his family in the autumn of 1939, travelling through Romania to Istanbul and then  Palestine, where he lived until the end of the war, working in a military design office, making engineering plans for troops fighting in North Africa, and giving lectures.

In 1946 he moved to Beirut, where he ran a design studio. Working with Wassek Adib, he designed many modernist buildings in Beirut, Tripoli and Said in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to lecturing at the Lebanese Institute of Painting and Graphic Arts in Beirut, he also cooperated with eminent Lebanese architects such as Bahij Khoury Makdisi, and notably Fritz Gothelf, a German architect based in Lebanon in the 1950s.

At that time Beirut was an open, modern city and devolping dynamically. Schayer’s functionalist style suited the city’s needs and his studio designed hotels, hospitals government offices and public buildings, as well as residential properties. Unfortunately, not all of his buildings have survived to the present day, with many being destroyed in the civil war.

In 1970 he left for the United States, where he died shortly after his arrival. In accordance with his last will, he was buried at the Polish cemetery in Beirut.  

We wish to put a commemorative plaque on the second Makdisi building, on Jeanne d'Arc street, next to the one that is on the corner of Jeanne d’Arc and Makdisi Street. The office of Schayer and Adib was located there from 1961, and was later renamed "The Architectural Center", following Schayer's departure to the United States in 1970.

Schayer’s major buildings in Beirut: AUB Alumni Clubhouse, Dar Al Sayad, Hazmieh; Hotel Carlton, Raouche; Horseshoe (Murr) Building, Hamra Street; The Shell Headquarter, Villa Bustani, Baabda Yarzeh; Makdisi Building, Spinney’s Supermarket; Baptist Church School, Hitti Building.