Frank Lloyd Wright in Baghdad

A colleague reminded me today that the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright had been involved in plans to modernise the Iraqi capital Baghdad, located on the plain between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. He visited the city in May 1957, as an old man nearing his 90th birthday, and, inspired both by Arab and Persian art and architecture, began to draft a series of blueprints for a new city.

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 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 Baghdad’s heritage, and that of the broader Arab world also. 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. It 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? Lloyd Wright’s vision for Baghdad was filtered through romantic notions of Arab history and myth, but in that he may have been closer to pan-Arab ideas of identity than perhaps we perceive at the moment.

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

Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation