[NEWS]: Babylonian dreamer: Frank Lloyd Wright's plans for Baghdad.
James Anatidae
Babylonian dreamer
ALEX MASSIE
Lost cities aren't discovered all that often these days. But visitors to the
Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona are privileged to cast
their eyes over one such missing metropolis. There, amid the more familiar
paeans of praise to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, or the architect
's "prairie style" houses, lie drawings from Wright's final years that offer
an intriguing glimpse into an alternative, unbuilt world.
Wright was over 90 when he visited Mesopotamia for the first time in 1957,
and the experience had a profound effect on him. When he saw the river
Tigris he knew this was a place where he could build. His plan was to create
an entirely new city on the great plain between the Tigris and the
Euphrates. Iraq as a whole and the city of Baghdad itself deserved nothing
less.
The elderly architect set to work and, in a matter of a few months, produced
designs for everything from a central post office to museums, parks and
gardens, as well as a new campus for Baghdad University. For good measure he
threw in designs for a casino, shopping complexes and a new opera house, to
be situated on an island in the Tigris.
This was his "Plan for Greater Baghdad," dedicated in part to the great
ancient cities of Sumeria and Babylon. Although architectural drawings can
give only an imperfect idea of what might have been built, they are
sufficient to suggest that had Wright been given his head something
remarkable would have been built on the banks of the Tigris.
Imagine a world in which Camelot met the Arabian Nights and you get some
idea of what America's greatest 20th-century architect had in mind - and of
why his last dream has been left unbuilt. His plans were just too ambitious,
too outlandish to be considered. Today his determination to build bridges
between past and present, Islam and the West, might have been welcomed; when
they were submitted they seemed dangerously close to the last lunatic
ravings of an architect whose genius had faded.
Half a century on, fashion has in one sense at least swung back to support
his point of view. According to Mina Marefat, Rockefeller Fellow in Islamic
Studies at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, studying again Wright's
plans for Baghdad could help ease the culture of mutual suspicion that
currently prevails in Iraq and bedevils reconstruction efforts.
"Iraqis think we want to kill their culture," she told the Washington Post
last week, "yet when America's greatest architect drew a plan for Baghdad,
where did he turn for inspiration? Not to American or European modernism
which was so fashionable at the time, but to Arab and Persian architecture,
which had shaped the famous Baghdad of the eighth and ninth century."
Marefat hopes that Wright's example can be an inspiration today, as the
United States struggles to come to terms with the scale of the rebuilding
required in Iraq following the destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Back in the late 1950s, when oil production was bringing Iraq great wealth,
King Faisal determined to bring his desert country into the "modern age",
hiring the greatest western architects as a means of demonstrating Iraq's
progress and increasing sophistication. In 1950 he had sanctioned the
establishment of a Development Board to oversee the construction of a new
infrastructure network. Baghdad, and by extension Iraq, would be the most
modern, progressive, western country in the region and, as it had been in
ancient times, the envy of the Arab world.
Wright's inclusion on the shortlist of architects invited to submit their
ideas was an afterthought. Le Corbusier from France, Walter Gropius from
Germany and Gio Ponti from Italy had already been invited - Baghdad was
showing signs of becoming an architectural crucible. But, latecomer or not,
Wright threw himself into the project with enthusiasm.
He spelt out his hopes - and fears - for the project: "I happen to be doing
a cultural centre for the place where civilisation was invented - that is
Iraq," he wrote. "Before Iraq was destroyed it was a beautiful circular city
built by Harun al Rashid but the Mongols came from the north and practically
destroyed it. Now what is left of the city has struck oil and they have
immense sums of money. They can bring back the city of Harun al Rashid
today. They are not likely to do it because a lot of western architects are
in there already building skyscrapers all over the place and they are going
to meet the destruction that is barging in on all big western cities. So it
seems to me vital over there to try and make them see how foolish it is to
join that western procession."
His Baghdad project was, he wrote, a "great opportunity" to "demonstrate
that we're not destructive but constructive where the original forces that
built the civilisations of the world are concerned." Above all, it was vital
to remember - and remind Iraqis - that "we are not there to slap them in the
face but to do honour to them".
Wright's references to Harun al-Rashid reflect not just the architect's
romantic side, but an awareness of, and need to acknowledge, the importance
of a distinct Arabian culture that had reached an apogee in Baghdad. Harun
al-Rashid's Caliphate at the end of the eighth century witnessed an artistic
revolution that made Baghdad the cultural centre of the Arab world until the
mid-13th century. Harun - to whom Wright planned to construct a memorial -
remains an immortal figure in the Arab consciousness, forever associated
with the glorious days when Arab scholars safeguarded the accumulated
knowledge of Greece and Rome during Europe's Dark Ages.
"Baghdad, the city of wisdom. It's a defining narrative," argues James
Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute. "The city represents, and
not only for Iraqis but for Arabs across the board, a time when the Arab
world knew itself to be the centre of civilisation, of science and art and
mystery. The symbol of Baghdad is richer, and deeper, than whoever is
messing it up right now."
Wright was himself familiar with the tales of Sinbad and of Arabia,
remembering them from his childhood. (Visitors to the house he designed for
his family outside Chicago can still see murals depicting episodes from the
Arabian Nights in the children's nursery.) It's easy to see why he was so
drawn to the idea of designing a new Baghdad that honoured that glorious
past. His vision for the city, says Marefat, "was intended to reinforce a
cultural identity rooted in a rich historic past. To this end he mined both
Islamic and pre-Islamic imagery, relying as much on myth and memory as on
historical context."
Wright's designs for the Iraqi capital were the last significant body of
work he undertook before his death in 1959. Here was a chance to do
something on an unusual, epic scale - a chance for ambition to be set free
to soar wherever the wind took it.
In the event his fantastic designs - featuring ziggurats and other nods to
the glories of ancient Babylon and Assyria - were widely derided, not just
by the modernist architects then in vogue but by the Arab world itself. They
were too much out of the pages of the Arabian Nights for a regime determined
to chase everything that represented western progress. In any case, Faisal
was overthrown in a coup in 1958, ending the project. The Baathists were now
in power, and modern architecture was not one of their primary concerns.
"The irony," says Marefat, "is that Wright was the only one of the
architects giving a thought to Iraq's cultural heritage in his designs, and
his weren't built. The others created 'modern' architecture of the era that
had little or no relation to Iraq or its history." The result, she argues,
is that Baghdad today could be mistaken for Los Angeles on the Tigris -
admittedly, made worse by the crassness of Saddam's pompous and ridiculous
homages to his own power, his palaces.
Baghdad has survived so much in its history that it seems certain to
struggle on, regardless of whoever happens to be in charge and regardless of
their intentions. If the city has evaded - just - the onslaught of the
Mongols, Tamerlane and Saddam, it may be able to absorb the consequences of
American occupation too.
Marefat, meanwhile, hopes that a new awareness of this final episode from
Wright's long and prolific career can act - as the architect himself always
hoped it would - as a unifying force between East and West, ancient and
modern. By challenging Americans and Iraqis alike to recognise the
importance of Baghdad's history and understand what it was that made the
city great in the past, it may be possible to make it so in the future.
--
Gargoyles SETI@home group
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/team/team_167065.html
Private
Richard