Frank Lloyd Wright, Visions of Baghdad
It’s a little known fact that the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was involved in plans to modernise the Iraqi capital Baghdad. He visited the city in May 1957, as an old man nearing his 90th birthday and, inspired by both Arab and Persian art and architecture, began to draft a series of blueprints for a new city.
Then monarch King Faisal II invited several prominent architects to contribute ideas to establish Baghdad as a modern world city. This included Le Corbusier, Gio Ponti and Walter Gropius. Faisal was assassinated in 1958, after which a military junta seized power, setting the scene for the modern history of Iraq with which we are depressingly familiar. None of Wright’s buildings were ever constructed, the new revolutionary government deeming them “too grandiose”, although some of the other plans were later implemented: Gropius’ Baghdad University (1960), Ponti’s Ministry of Planning building (1958), and a Le Corbusier sports hall (the Saddam Hussein Gymnasium, erected in 1981).
Lloyd Wright’s “Plan for Greater Baghdad” was drawn up over the course of several months following his visit, and his romantic vision drew heavily on the myth and memory of Harun al-Rashid, the 8th century caliph under whom Baghdad rose to pre-eminence as the regional cultural and political capital in the Islamic period. That Baghdad was destroyed in 1258 by the Mongols, but has remained alive in the Arab memory ever since.
Lloyd Wright rejected the modernist notions of the other architects, “those glass box boys”, as intent on glorifying western industrial achievement, and focused instead on creating architecture that spoke of both Baghdad’s heritage and that of the broader Arab world. Not only al-Rashid, but also Aladdin, Scheherezade, the Arabian Nights, ancient Mesopotamia, and the Garden of Eden.
The Harun al-Rashid monument (above) drew directly on the circular ziggurat style. This was an Islamic modification of the ancient Mesopotamian ziggurats, and can be seen in Iraq at the Great Mosque at Samarra (damaged in the current conflict) and other sites. The style was also exported to other places in the Islamic world, such as the Ibn Tulun mosque in Cairo, the city’s oldest.
Mindful of the necessities of modern life, Lloyd Wright also designed elements of infrastructure, such as a Postal-Telegraph Building:
Other buildings included an opera house (echoed by the Grady Gaggage Auditorium in Tempe, Arizona), a marketplace – complete with concrete domed ‘merchant kiosks’ – a university, art gallery and museum. I couldn’t find any explicit reference to housing in the plans, which would have been interesting, given Lloyd Wright’s skill at designing houses mindful of their historical and landscape setting. The designs made use of the domes, towers, curves and other motifs familiar in middle Eastern architecture to this day.
A new interventionist regime has played its part in the destruction of revolutionary Baghdad. It is hard to see a new Iraq – with or without American influence – harking back to the plans of Frank Lloyd Wright, or of Le Corbusier and others, if and when the opportunity to revitalise a once-great city arises. Development is more likely to adhere to tenets of low-cost, expedience, population management and immediate economic sustenance. How the ability of Baghdad to breathe life into the modern city pans out, who can tell?
Links:
Building for Democracy: Frank Lloyd Wright may yet “build” Baghdad, Wall Street Journal (2003)
Babylon Dreamer, The Scotsman (2003)
The Genie in an Architect’s Lamp, Washington Post (2003)
When Iraq Looked West, LA Times (2003)
The 1957 Baghdad Project, All-Wright Guide
Jeffery Aronin interviews FLW in 1957 for WNYC
Disclaimer: this is a reworked 2007 post from my previous blog KuiperCliff.
This is an awesome, awesome post. I love architecture (but don’t really know enough about it except to sit back and go “hey that’s a cool looking building”). Links should keep me busy for a while.
Thanks Munz,
The whole architecture/Baghdad issue is one that Bryan Finoki in particular has covered a lot at Subtopia. I defer to him in considerations of the war/architecture nexus. I’m sure more has probably been written about Lloyd Wright and Iraq since I initially looked at this back in early 2007. If you happen to stumble across anything in your travels, please let me know!
Projects by Frank Lloyd Wright and other famous names from the West in Baghdad, such as their realizations, are wellknown: Gropius, Le Corbusier Doxiadis, Alto, Gio Ponti, among others.
For more information on Wright’s, work, I suggest you search Dr Mina Marefat’s researches, which are the most accurate and documented papers on the topic.
Eventually, there is currently an exhibition in Madrid, (curator the Universitat Politecnica of Barcelona in collaboration with Baghdad University), which is the very first to document all the main projects as well as realisations made by the foreigners in Baghdad from 1950 to 1980, with models and, various papers with unpubished findings in the catalogue: “City of mirages: Baghdad, from Wright to Venturi” . This exhibition can You can get more informations writing to:
Pedro.Azara@upc.edu.
Projects by Frank Lloyd Wright and other famous names from the West in Baghdad, such as their realizations, are wellknown: Gropius, Le Corbusier, Doxiadis, Alto, Gio Ponti, among others.
For more information on Wright’s, work, I suggest you search Dr Mina Marefat’s researches, which are the most accurate and documented papers on the topic.
Eventually, there is currently an exhibition in Madrid, (curator the Universitat Politecnica of Barcelona in collaboration with Baghdad University), which is the very first to document all the main projects as well as realisations made by the foreigners in Baghdad from 1950 to 1980, with models and, various papers with unpubished findings in the catalogue: “City of mirages: Baghdad, from Wright to Venturi” . You can get more informations writing to:
Pedro.Azara@upc.edu.
The exhibiton, called City of Mirages. Baghdad, from Wright to Venturi, has been shown at the College of Architects in Barcelona (Spain), The Arab House in Madrid (Spain) and now at the College of Architects in Murcia (Spain) until february 2009.
It might then travel to Holland and to different arab states.
The College of Architects of Barcelona (Col.legi Oficial d´Arquitectes de Catalunya -COAC) has made a documentary on the exhibition that will be shown in their web page very soon and that could be seen easily.
The idea is to let the exhibition travel until 2011 when we shall try to present it in Baghdad. Now it is impossible.
The School of Architecture of Barcelona (Escola Tècnica Superior d´Arquitectura de Barcelona -ETSAB) has publish a scholarly catalogue of the exhibition, with texts in spanish, french, english and arabic
Pedro Azara
Barcelona (Spain)
pedro.azara@upc.edu
Excellent. Thanks, Caecilia and Pedro. I’ll look out for that, or let me know when the COAC documentary is posted online. When I have some time, perhaps I’ll dig around a bit more in this. When I originally wrote this post in 2007, there didn’t seem to be much, in English at least, about the role of Western architects in Baghdad but it now appears that there is a wealth of information out there. Thanks very much.