IN SEARCH OF BAGHDAD When Iraq Looked West
Part Two: Only a few decades ago, Baghdad's longing to modernize drew some of the world's top architects, who began reshaping the historic city. The endeavor ended too soon.
By Nicolai Ouroussoff
Times Staff Writer

December 14, 2003

BAGHDAD — It is hard to convey the degree of hostility many in this city feel toward the West today. But there was a time when Baghdad hungered for the trappings of Western culture. This was especially true in architecture, and it redefined the city's physical shape as much as any war.

More construction took place in Baghdad during the second half of the 20th century than at any time since the Golden Age of the Abbasid dynasty came to a close nearly 750 years ago. Most of this new work was Modern in spirit and represented a radical break with Baghdad's past. Among the international architects with major projects here were Frank Lloyd Wright, then nearing the end of his career; Walter Gropius, a founder of the Bauhaus; and the Italian Modernist Gio Ponti. They were soon followed by a rising generation of Iraqi talents who sought to infuse Western architectural forms with a more local sensibility. Together, such architects transformed Baghdad into a modern city — one whose defining urban features were rooted in the cultural traditions of the West.

In a city whose history extends nearly 1,250 years, this period of experimentation lasted a few short decades, beginning in the late 1950s. By the time Saddam Hussein had consolidated his power at the end of the 1970s, it was essentially dead.

But what these architects set out to create was inspired by faith in the promise of modernity — the notion that it could lead to a more egalitarian world. And if the balance of cultural power was tipped in favor of the West, the clash of values it embodied led to a remarkable process of self-discovery, one that has particular resonance given the current climate of hostility toward the U.S.

Decay and beauty

The seeds of modern Baghdad were planted at the beginning of the 20th century, in the waning days of Ottoman rule. Today, even amid the escalating violence, they can be found in places like Rashid Street, whose crumbling porticoes carve through the historic quarter of Rusafa.

The street is a picture of urban decay. Many of the two- and three-story structures are literally crumbling. Shutters hang from their hinges, balconies are littered with cardboard boxes. A dense web of electrical wires and telephone cables crisscrosses the street. Below, car horns blare while vendors hawk their wares under the shade of the covered porticoes.

But at dusk, when the street is empty, its old beauty surfaces. Conceived by the Ottomans in 1916, Rashid Street was modeled on the grand boulevards Georges Eugène Haussmann designed in late 19th century Paris. The repetitive rhythm of its columns gives the street a remarkable sense of social cohesion. Its porticoes evoke notions of public spectacle associated with the rise of the European bourgeoisie.

This sense of uniformity breaks down as one examines the architecture more closely. Each building was designed according to the tastes of its owner, and the result was a remarkable clash of styles, from a streamlined Modernism to a more opulent Islamic classicism. The effect is a kind of controlled chaos — a vibrant blend of Western and Arab themes. It is also an eloquent expression of a society's ability to adapt to outside influences.

"It was an obvious break from our tradition," says Saad Zubaidi, who oversees the ministry of housing and construction. "[Baghdad] used to have all these streets running perpendicular to the river. It allowed the breeze to flow into the neighborhoods. Rashid Street is cut parallel to the river. But the unity is very powerful. The arcades worked climatically. It was the heart of the city until the 1970s."

That mix of traditional and modern influences is a feature of many of the city's 1930s-era structures. On Haifa Street, for example, a small cluster of houses faces the British Embassy along an otherwise sterile strip of concrete office buildings and apartment complexes. The houses' covered loggias and Doric columns bring to mind images of Colonial-era decorum.

But the facade is only a public mask. In one, a series of rooms leads into a traditional hosh, the open-air courtyard that was once the center of family life in Baghdad. From here, one descends a narrow stair to the underground room where Baghdadis retreated during sweltering afternoons — a tradition that is now virtually forgotten.

Such houses were typically commissioned by upper-middle-class Iraqis, who simply altered the designs of British construction firms. Yet signs of a more radical shift were already emerging. Increasingly, wealthy Arabs were sending their children to study in the West. Many returned enamored of the new architecture they saw there.

"For these people, heritage was linked to poverty," Zubaidi says. "The traditional houses and alleyways, the sleeping on the roof — they were not proud of it. It was a question of identity. People wanted something new."

Today, evidence of that shift can be seen in two small houses, both designed by Badri Kadah — a Syrian-born architect trained in the West. The most magical of these is tucked away on a quiet, dusty street just north of the city center, not far from the Tigris River. Shaded by citrus trees, the house's clean concrete form is a textbook example of Bauhaus-inspired Modernism.

What is most striking about Kadah's work is its ability to convey the impact Modern architecture had on the imagination of Iraqi architects. The house was commissioned in 1936 by the founder of the National Democratic Party, Kamil Chadirji, whose son went on to become one of the country's most prominent architects. The second house, now abandoned, was the birthplace of Zaha Hadid, who in the 1970s moved to London, where she is now a major figure among architecture's international vanguard.

Embracing the West

The longing Iraqis felt for almost anything Western — from fashion to architecture to movies — may seem almost inconceivable at a time when much of the world views the U.S. cultural dominance as a particularly insidious form of imperialism. But only a generation ago, Baghdad's growing middle class embraced modernity as a sign of prosperity.

In the late 1950s, an increasingly unpopular Iraqi monarchy was awash in new oil revenues and was looking for a way to prove to its citizens that the country was on the road to liberalization. Architecture — and the prestige of Western architects — became a convenient tool to convey that message.

The University of Baghdad, for example, is a model of Postwar idealism. The sprawling campus is in the suburban neighborhood of Jadiriya, along a bend in the Tigris River. Since the war, the campus has been guarded by U.S. military checkpoints, giving it the aura of a walled community.

"After the Sinai Crisis [in 1956] violent student demonstrations erupted in all of the Middle East," says Husam Rawi, a professor at the university's department of architecture. "The old university was in the center of Baghdad. I think the students were placed here to isolate them."

In fact, the campus feels as if it could be anywhere. Designed in the 1950s and '60s by the Architects' Collaborative, an American firm led by Gropius, it is anchored by a Brutalist-style residential tower and library. The classrooms are scattered around this core, linked by elevated walkways and open-air courts. To address Baghdad's heat, the buildings were equipped with concrete brises-soleil and deep roof overhangs.

But what the design really evokes are the progressive values associated with Cold War-era America. They are shaped by the belief that the language of International Style Modernism — and the universal ideals it embodied — could be made to fit any context.

That approach is expressed even more vividly in Ponti's 1958 design for the ministry of planning, which rises at the foot of the Jumhuriya Bridge near the gates of the Republican Palace. Today the building is surrounded by coils of razor wire and guarded by a couple of U.S. soldiers, its once-elegant facade charred from a fire set by looters.

Despite the damage, any architecture student would recognize its origin: The ministry's streamlined exterior is a replica of Ponti's earlier design for the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan, Italy, a landmark of Italian high style. The differences are in the packaging. Sheathed in glass, the Milan version is slender and elegant. Ponti clad the ministry building in red limestone, giving it a clunkier look. Yet once inside, the eye glides across sensuous white marble surfaces that are the epitome of contemporary refinement.

Wright's 1950s-era design for a massive cultural complex, never built, offers a more stereotypical interpretation of Iraqi architectural traditions. Dubbed Edena after the mythical Garden of Eden, the complex would have rested on an island in the middle of the Tigris River. A circular opera house, capped by a metal dome and a statue of Aladdin, is surrounded by elaborate pools and gardens. Nearby, a 300-foot spiral tower, decorated with images of camels, was meant to evoke traditional spiral minarets. These decorative features make the design an embarrassing example of Western chauvinism.

"Wright wanted to give them something of their own," says Neil Levine, a Harvard professor who recently completed a book on the architect, "some middle ground between our culture and theirs. He misread the signs. They wanted something up to date."

Bringing foreign ideas home

None of these works would be considered masterpieces of 20th century design. But they performed an important function. Architecture is a physical experience — it needs to be seen and touched to be wholly understood. The buildings constructed in late-1950s and early-1960s Baghdad put the city's rising intelligentsia in direct contact with the language of Western Modernism. It was an invaluable experience.

"There were many of us," says the 77-year-old Rifat Chadirji, who left Baghdad for London in the early 1980s and has yet to return. "Many of us lived on the same street. Kahtan Awni had studied architecture at Berkeley in California. There was [the sculptor] Jewad Selim. Every night we discussed how we should approach modernity, what it means to us."

In many ways, Chadirji is the most compelling of these figures. Raised in the belly of Baghdad's cultural establishment, he completed his architectural education in London, where he became enamored with the abstract compositions of architects like Le Corbusier. His life's work can be read as an effort to synthesize those competing identities.

The Chadirji-designed Federation of Industries building, completed in 1966, rises along Khilani Square, across the river from the Republican Palace and near an enormous mural designed by Selim. The mural is decorated with a series of bronze casts, abstract renderings of ancient Sumerian and Assyrian figures. In front of it, a broad staircase leads down into a ring of subterranean shops — part of a 1980s-era plan for a subway system that was never completed. The shops have long since been abandoned; a few addicts linger here among towering weeds.

The office building is also boarded shut, but its defining feature — the facade — remains intact. Rising seven stories, the building's curved exterior form is shielded by a series of vertical concrete panels. The panels — supported by concrete beams — seem to hover in midair. Narrow, arched balconies project out from their surfaces, adding to the sense of visual depth.

The facade design is an interpretation of the traditional wood screens that are a common feature in Islamic architecture. Its delicate interplay of vertical, intersecting forms is also modern in spirit, evoking the rich geometries of a Mondrian painting.

Other architects took a more literal-minded approach to the past. Mohamed Makiya, chairman of Baghdad University's department of architecture from 1959 to 1968, fits squarely into the Post-Modernist camp. His 1963 design for the Khulafa mosque is essentially conceived as a stage set. Adjoining a 14th century minaret, the mosque's octagonal form and shallow dome evoke obvious historical precedents. But the function of its covered arcade, framed by arched columns, is primarily decorative. Its view of history is laced with nostalgia.

By comparison, Kahtan Awni's design for the Mustansiriya University is more closely allied with conventional Modernist precedents. Like the Baghdad University design, its low buildings are arranged around a series of outdoor courtyards. The difference is in the treatment of the surfaces. Massive concrete screens are cantilevered off the front of the various classroom buildings. The screens are decorated in an abstract pattern of colorful mosaic tiles — a classical Islamic motif.

Fear replaces freedom

At their core, these works embody the struggle toward self-discovery that lies at the heart of any artistic endeavor. They also signify a rising sense of national self-awareness. Their mission was nothing less than to establish, through architecture, a new cultural balance between a dominant West and an emerging Arab identity.

Tragically, that spirit of experimentation was never allowed to mature. Middle East politics would soon erode Arab trust in the West and its values, including the promises of modernity. By the close of the 1970s, the sense of creative freedom that defined Iraq was replaced by a climate of fear. Hussein was firmly in control of the country; the machinery of oppression was locked in place. Many of Baghdad's cultural elite fled. Selim, in many ways the spirit behind the Modern movement in Baghdad, died in 1961. By the 1980s, Chadirji had settled in London.

For those who remained behind, the final blow came from the West. Sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990 by the U.N. Security Council cut off remaining ties that the city's creative community shared with their foreign counterparts. Even those Iraqi architects willing to serve Hussein retreated into an increasingly dark, isolated existence. The spirit of exchange — and the trust it helped to engender — was gone. The road back
Last of four parts: Baghdad must battle internal strife to rebuild, but it will take a spirit of openness.
By Nicolai Ouroussoff
Times Staff Writer

December 16, 2003

BAGHDAD — One of the great ironies of the war in Iraq is that, despite the continuing human carnage, Baghdad's physical structures were preserved relatively intact.

Reminders that this is a city under siege — razor wire, military checkpoints, barricaded roads and the occasional charred ruin of a government building — are inescapable. But over time, a more insidious form of abuse has become apparent: evidence of a cultural violence that stripped away much of the city's identity.

Baghdad may once have rivaled Rome as a symbol of urban splendor, but most of its historic landmarks are gone. Many of the uniform beige subdivisions and drab commercial buildings constructed in the last 50 years are crumbling — an apt symbol of the failures of modernization. The city's ornate palaces are painful reminders of the authoritarian rule of Saddam Hussein, who is now in American captivity.

Coping with this architectural and cultural loss is clearly beyond the scope of responsibility of the U.S. occupying authority.

Faced with continued unrest, Baghdad is still struggling to restore basic infrastructure more than seven months after troops took the city. The U.S. government recently allotted $20 million for the reconstruction of Iraqi palaces and ministry buildings damaged during the war — by either American missiles or Iraqi looters. But the structures remain abandoned.

It's hard to engage in any discussion of the city's architectural future under such circumstances. At the same time, many Iraqis I met seemed to find comfort in imagining the form this city could one day take. The discussion itself seemed like an act of liberation — a blow against the injustices of the past. And if such moments inspired hope, it was in the degree to which they allowed one to visualize the emergence of a more humane urban vision.

At its best, this is what architecture does. It can create walls, but it can also break them down. In helping to shape the boundaries that bind and separate us, it can act as a forum for social discourse.

In Baghdad, the process of reconstruction is a political necessity. But it also can be seen as an opportunity to come to terms with history. This is a city where East and West have collided for centuries. Its survival depends on its ability to overcome internal conflicts. The imaginative work of constructing that future is one way to embark on the process of reconciliation.

Cities rethought, rebuilt

Other cities have responded to social upheavals and the devastation of war as a platform for reinvention. Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, for example, Berlin launched a sweeping building program aimed at making the city whole again. The results were mixed. They included nostalgic representations of the past as well as corporate skyscrapers and generic shopping arcades — the kind of mega-developments that have become a staple of the new global economy. Nonetheless, they sparked a heated public debate over the city's identity — from its legacy of totalitarianism to its place at the center of a rising Europe.

In China, the violent political shifts of the 1990s radically transformed the centuries-old landscape of Shanghai. In a little more than a decade, the city has come to resemble a Futurist dream, with skyscrapers rising at a pace unrivaled even in 1920s-era Manhattan. But the new Shanghai is also a carefully conceived political creation — an island of unchecked capitalism that is in many ways sealed off from the rest of the country.

In Beirut, a team of local developers recently completed the first phase in the reconstruction of the city's historic core — an area torn apart by a 15-year civil war. Its cobblestone streets are lined with the kind of high-priced boutiques that can be found in the international terminal of any major airport.

By contrast, the city's 1950s-era corniche remains a remarkably complex picture of urban life. Its mix of private clubs, public beaches and pedestrian walkways unfurls along the Mediterranean — where rich and poor, Muslim and Christian, old and young are intertwined in a richly textured social experience. A second wave of development, in the planning stages, seeks to unite these realities; it has drawn some of the world's most talented architects.

Such models could one day apply to Baghdad. They suggest ways of coming to terms with deep cultural fissures, among them the conflict between the emerging global landscape and local culture.

Baghdad started down this road nearly a half-century ago, when it embarked on one of the most ambitious building programs in its history. At the time, most Iraqi architects openly embraced Western Modernism. Eventually they attempted to integrate these Western forms within Islamic traditions. But today, symbols of the West no longer carry that cultural currency. Rather than a force for progress, Western culture is increasingly seen as a corrupting influence — a tool of imperial power.

One particular morning, the ministry of housing and construction's temporary home — an unremarkable two-story office building in the center of Baghdad — is surprisingly alive. Iraqi contractors, seeking work, pack the building's tiny lobby. In a back room, Saad Zubaidi, who oversees the ministry, is sitting in the dark behind a wood desk. Electricity is sporadic, and the curtains are drawn to keep out the heat.

"After the 1991 war, we put the electricity back on within 45 days," Zubaidi says, his tone reflecting the disenchantment that many here feel toward the U.S. "There were 134 bridges, and all of them were reconstructed before 1993, except two. The Republican Palace was rebuilt in a year."

Zubaidi acknowledges that progress is being made. The U.S. military's Corps of Engineers, he says, is still trying to determine how a range of civic buildings could be put to better use now that the dictator is no longer in power. One proposal involves an existing museum in Zawra Park. The museum, marked by a towering stainless-steel clock tower, once housed gifts Hussein received from foreign dignitaries. The corps of engineers has suggested transforming it into a courthouse. But Zubaidi finds the idea baffling.

"If Big Ben is next to Parliament, why not have a supreme court underneath the tower? I think that was the idea. Maybe now the ministry of transportation will make the main railway station into a zoo."

Such cynicism — from a man tapped by the Americans to help organize the rebuilding effort — is an indication of how difficult it will be to transform Baghdad into a functioning city again. U.S. construction giant Bechtel Corp. — which has already received $600 million to rebuild the country's infrastructure — has started hiring local contractors. But the Bush administration has yet to articulate a clear vision for the city's future.

Communities in isolation

While Americans struggle to gain the trust of Iraqis, Baghdad is suffering from the effects of balkanization. Most of the 1,000 or so U.S. officials who are stationed here are sequestered on the grounds of what was once Hussein's presidential compound, which have been expanded to include the Rashid Hotel and the nearby convention center. U.S. troops guard the gates from behind coils of razor wire.

Inside, the compound seems relatively calm. In the convention center's meeting rooms, men in pressed suits confer over Iraq's future. Watches bearing the likeness of Hussein are for sale in the hotel's lobby. On this particular day, Gen. Tommy Franks is giving Robert De Niro a tour of the Republican Palace.

The impression is of a cloistered community sealed off from day-to-day reality. The disconnect has hardened over the past few months. Soon after the suicide bombing attack against the U.N. headquarters here, the Army Corps of Engineers built an 18-foot-tall concrete barrier around the entire U.S. compound. Smaller barriers — some reinforced with containers of sand — have gone up around many of the city's hotels and diplomatic missions.

Baghdad's intellectual community seems similarly segregated. Professors ponder the city's future in the isolation of a few university campuses. Other members of the cultured middle class, fearing for their safety and with no real place to go, simply stay at home — as cut off as they were during Hussein's day.

Meanwhile, many of the poorer neighborhoods have become fundamentalist strongholds. The Shiite ghetto east of the city center, once dubbed Saddam City, was renamed Sadr City after the martyred father of Muqtader Sadr, one of the country's most radical fundamentalist leaders. Its humble mosque — a decrepit concrete shed — has become a symbolic center of Iraqi resistance and independence.

Other sites, such as the ancient mosque in Kadhimiya, with its walled courtyard and domed sanctuary, conjure a world oblivious to the commercialism of imported Western values.

This breakdown of Baghdad into distinct ideological zones has implications for the city's future. But it also has symbolic importance. In the wealthy suburban enclave of Mansour, for example, the raw concrete shell of an enormous mosque dominates an otherwise barren construction site. The mosque was commissioned by Hussein, but construction stopped at the outbreak of the war and has yet to resume. Today the site is guarded by a particularly radical faction of Shiite fundamentalists.

From the mosque's upper levels, one can survey the tranquillity of the surrounding neighborhood. The winding, palm-lined streets and 1950s-era houses, with their sleek lines and flat roofs, recall a time when most of Baghdad was entranced with Western modernity.

The mosque's massive form looms over the sprawling neighborhood. The contrast serves as an emblem of the remarkable cultural shifts that have occurred here in the half-century since Mansour was built. They represent two visions of the world, locked in opposition to each other.

The balkanization of Baghdad is apt to continue and suggests a more complex inner conflict. The city's physical breakdown is an expression of barriers within the mind — the invisible walls that separate secular and nonsecular worlds, modernity and tradition, radical and moderate.

Blueprints for the future

Any architect who has spent time in Baghdad would be able to pick out the starting points for a vision of a different city. That urban narrative inevitably begins at the river — the city's lifeblood.

Applying conventional Western development formulas, one could picture the slow-moving river lined with new high-rise residential towers, fast-food restaurants, commercial strips and a pastiche of high-tech advertising. Rashid Street would become a themed shopping mall, its covered arcades restored and stocked with generic retail shops, a Middle Eastern outpost for the consumer class.

Conversely, an enlightened model for the city's reconstruction would draw on a more critical examination of Baghdad's history and cultural values. Until they were outlawed by Hussein, for example, makeshift sheds and nightly festivals once common on the Tigris' right bank were one of the Middle East's most compelling social experiences. They embodied the river's function as a place of healing — both a social mixing chamber and a psychological link to the outside world. A version of that tradition could be revived.

Along Rashid Street, the architecture offers a potent mix of Arab and European themes that could become a more nuanced blueprint for the future, one that maintains the cultural frictions that give a city its texture. The palace grounds that were once Hussein's private playground could be reimagined in a more democratic form, places where Iraqis could escape the tensions of daily life, much like Frederick Law Olmsted's Central Park in New York.

The more time one spends here, the clearer it becomes that any attempt to imagine a conventional narrative in this city — especially a Western formula, however enlightened — both ignores history and demonstrates the worst kind of hubris. The fate of Baghdad is now being determined in places like Washington, D.C., but it is also an issue of local identity.

Part of the process of healing will occur through the city's physical reconstruction. In the immediate future, it will involve basic issues over how to get the city functioning again. Even amid the current uncertainty, the occupying authority has little choice but to press ahead with restoring a range of public services, from the electrical grid and communications network to sewage facilities and transportation.

But the more difficult task of rebuilding the city's cultural confidence may not be so easily solved. It will not occur by imposing foreign values on a populace that has become particularly sensitive to the motives of outsiders. What it will require is a spirit of genuine openness — the ability to listen as well as act.

The U.S. has a vital role to play in creating such an environment. Even as the city struggles to get back on its feet, the occupying authority can begin the process of building cultural alliances between Iraqi architects and their foreign counterparts. This process is already taking place at the Iraq Museum, where a number of international art professionals have been working with local officials to help restore the museum's looted collections. Together, they have initiated a dialogue about how best to preserve the city's past. There is no reason a similar discussion could not occur about the city's future, especially in the realm of urban planning.

An imaginative discussion about reconstruction, in fact, would provide a welcome forum for working out Baghdad's identity, in terms of repairing Hussein's brutal architectural legacy and hammering out the city's collective values.

But ultimately, if Baghdad is to become a model for change in the Middle East, it will require a degree of cultural understanding on the part of the West that has yet to materialize. It would mean acknowledging that Baghdad can be resurrected only by tapping the depths of its own historical experience. Iraqis will have to negotiate a delicate path between neglect of the past and hostility toward the present — and forge their own identity in relation to the outside world.

The form such a city would take is difficult to picture today. But this type of cultural reconciliation may be the most secure road to what now seems unimaginable: a vision of Baghdad that recaptures the spirit of intellectual freedom that once made this one of the world's great cities.