The Melancholic City of Mirages: Zeina Al Derry

THE Melancholic CITY OF MIRAGES

Zeina Al-Derry Under the Supervision of Mark Campbell The Architectural Association School of Architecture

“Baghdad was designed in the eighth century as a work of art in itself… the most splendid in the history of the Arabs.”

Edward Said 1

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Said, Edward and Singh, Amritjit. Interviews with Edward W. Said. p.66

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6 Greetings ----------------------------------------------------------------14 A Piece of the Sky ----------------------------------------------------------------44 One Thousand and One Nights ----------------------------------------------------------------78 The Thief of Baghdad ----------------------------------------------------------------92 Parting ----------------------------------------------------------------96 Bibliography

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Greetings

Baghdad was constructed in the eighth century to be the unrivalled capital city of the Abbasid caliphate and to become the destination of scholars, poets and merchants, at a time when poetry was at its peak as the topmost art in the Arab world. The creation of the city was a work of art in itself as it coincided with, and was inspired by, the creative imagination of the numerous poets who were not necessarily its residents, but indeed identified with it. Those were followed by subsequent generations of others who sought to carve the image of the city in verse, as an object of desire, a literary trope, and enshrine it in the mantle of universal myth for over 1,250 years. 2 Baghdad, backed by thousand years of culture, claimed the attention of the poets for its artistic achievements and cosmopolitan atmosphere as well as for its dramatic periods of decline and disintegration as a theatre for bloody wars. Bearing in mind that cities are living processes rather than products or formalistic shells for living 3, the image of a utopian Baghdad, an alternative, a metaphor, remained immune to vicissitudes of time and the dreary reality of the earthly city.

The 20th century is an interesting period for the city due to the advent of the monarchy in 1921, the independence in 1932 and the subsequent regeneration projects in the political, economic, intellectual and artistic fields. 4 As such, the mid-twentieth century Baghdad witnessed an unprecedented architectural development, both in scale and ambition, that attempted to shape a distinct cultural identity while embracing universal elements influenced by foreign movements. Its modernisation process, however, grew equated with westernisation in certain cases.

Therefore, the preliminary questions that are driving this thesis are: was Baghdad able to become modern, thus losing its oriental quality, without losing its identity? How could the city re-establish its legitimacy in architectural terms that would be meaningful to the local population whilst simultaneously positioning itself along the trajectory of progress, particularly when considering the most recent political and sectarian upheavals that continue to threaten Iraq as a state entity?

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Snir, Reuven. Baghdad: The City in Verse. p.2 LeGates, Richard T. and Stout, Frederic. The City Reader, p. 33 Pieri, Caecilia. Baghdad Arts Deco: Architectural Brickwork, 1920-1950. p. I

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The aim of the thesis is, therefore, to interrogate the connections between modernity and the identity of Baghdad through the investigation of several historiographical approaches to the architectural development of the twentieth century city and analyse the work of selected architects that were involved in the modernisation process of the city. According to Benjamin, history was established as a linear, progressive sequence of cause and effect; it belonged to science and the present, not rhetorical persuasion or didactic illustration. 5 As such, the past as a separate period of time will be critically analysed and instrumentally reconstructed in order to achieve for the present its independence and critical awareness, which is essential for Baghdad. This aimed reconstruction of history and the deconstruction of the architects’ individual visions against each other is not concerned with the distillation of a pure objective truth, but to reveal a complex and rather chaotic exchanges, interchanges, demands and resistances, which came about as part of spatio-temporal and socio-geographical dynamics; as such, to gain a different understanding of the city, the presence of its past in relation to the present, and construct a new historiographical account of its identity.

Possessing a historical perspective is vital for the 'architect' to be conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity. This understanding can be achieved through realising the timeless in tradition, as well as of the temporal, and of the timeless and of the temporal together. 6 The meaning that is indented by contemporaneity is the nature of the moment occupied presently and the ways this occupation might potentially affect our position towards the past. This definition of tradition gains more validity in comparison to the increasing placelessness in the universality of modernism, which was divorced from the liberative cultural drive that it initiated the movement with, due to the conflict with monopolistic interests state capitalism post the First World War. 7 Perhaps the purpose of this ongoing act of happening with history is actually saving the past as Walter Benjamin proposed in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, which rejected the past as a continuum of progress: “History is not simply a science but also and not least a form a remembrance. What science has “determined,” remembrance can modify. Such mindfulness can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete”. 8

Boyer, Christine. The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments. p.22 6 Cianci, Giovanni, and Harding, Jason. T.S. Eliot and the concept of tradition.

7Frampton, Kenneth , Towards a Critical Regionalism, 8 Benjamin, Walter, and Arendt, Hannah. Illuminations.

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Traditional Baghdadi alleyway.

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“Not a single window on the outside: the walls are uniform in colour. As everywhere in this region, not a stone, just brick, the colour of sun-baked mud. Within, the aspect softens. Here is all the liveliness of existence. Here is a first courtyard, then a second… around these, the galleries, the terraces opening onto the family apartments… some have a pool or a fountain in the middle, even some greenery, a pomegranate or an oleander” 9

Rivoyre Denis de. 2012. Vrais Arabes Et Leur Pays. Bagdad Et Les Villes Ignorees de L'Euphrate...

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Corbelling to angle shanashils and so achieve the long view.

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Screened and balconied windows over the narrow alleyway

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Galleries around a central open courtyard, with dominant columns on the upper floor

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“… and they went on till they reached a spacious ground-floor hall built with admirable skill and beautiful with all manners of colours and carvings; with upper balconies and groined arches and galleries and cupboards and recesses whose curtains hung before them. In the midst stood a great basin of water surrounding a fine fountain, and at the upper end of the raised dais was a couch of juniper wood set with gems and pearls, with canopy like mosquito curtains of red satin-silk looped up with pearls as big as filberts..” 10

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The passage is a translation of Sir Richard Burton’s passage.

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A piece of the sky

The basis of the extremely dense urban fabric of Baghdad was the two-storied, inward facing brick house, which was, like other residential typologies, an expression of its particular culture, anchored in specific geographical territory where a society has developed its own identity. This traditional dwelling displays structural complexity in its spatial arrangements that any side of the lot can face the street without interfering with the internal organisation of the spaces. 11 The interior space was designed around a central open courtyard that was surrounded by galleries on both ground and first floors, surmounted by a mezzanine of thin wooden columns with characteristic multifaceted slender shafts. 12 The first floor’s exterior facades are distinguished by screened and balconied windows, which jetty out from the upper rooms over the narrow streets of the traditional quarters of the city. These projections of ornate latticed wood are often fitted within rounded windows that grew characteristic of the traditional Baghdadi house; yet also fit the general typology of Ottoman houses found in Turkey, Syria and Cyprus. 13 They serve as jalousies permitting the inhabitants, especially the women, to see without being seen. Indeed, the emphasis on the local virtues of hospitality and privacy, in addition to the desire to create a superior sense of the familial place, shaped the internal zoning of the house, which reflects a socio-spatial pattern whose roots are cultural as well as religious. These design measures include the divisions of the living quarters into distinct areas and the creation of a complex, chicane-like entrance arrangement, which are subject to variation according to the size of the house and the number of courtyards it contains. The main factor that alters the underlying spatial-religious structure of the courtyard house is that of climate and particularly how its impact can be modified by architectural means. 14

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Edwards, Brian (et al.) Courtyard Housing: Past, Present and Future. p. 216 Pieri, Caecilia. Baghdad Arts Deco: Architectural Brickwork, 1920-1950. p. 26 Pieri, Caecilia. Baghdad Arts Deco: Architectural Brickwork, 1920-1950. p. 26 Edwards, Brian (et al.) Courtyard Housing: Past, Present and Future. p. 219

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Gallery around a central open courtyard

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House in Kadhimiya, Baghdad

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House in Kadhimiya, Baghdad

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The courtyard dwelling continues to be accepted by some as the house of women’s segregation and the physical manifestation of principles of spatial hierarchy based on deeply embedded ideologies of social hierarchisation of the sexes and prevailing stereotypical assumptions about women. 15 Several studies that examined the social agenda of the house associate the need for separation between private and public with gender inequality in the Baghdadi society as a whole, which implies that the design itself is inherently patriarchal. The research conducted by Iraqi architect, Raya Ani, exemplified this association and further linked it to the veil traditionally worn by Muslim women, which she regarded as an oppressive practice. Based on this perception promoted by advocates of liberation and modernisation, which equated westernisation, the modern house grew accepted in the 1950s and 1960s as the manifestation of progressiveness and women were portrayed as the symbols of this enlightened scene, unveiled, liberated and residing in a contemporary home. These new modern aesthetics that emerged carried the assumption that society was reformed. 16 In order to demonstrate this, the following analysis will critically investigate the methods, theories and designs that were undertaken by the prominent architect Rifat Chadirji. This exploration is intended to detect the boundaries between the regional and the modern in order to reveal a new historiographical perspective of the city.

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Ani, Raya. In the Shadow of Segregation p. 3 Ani, Raya. In the Shadow of Segregation p. 31

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One pattern of street life in Baghdad

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Rifa’at Chadirji was raised in the heart of Baghdad’s cultural establishment and completed his architectural education in London, where he became enamoured with the abstract compositions of architects like Le Corbusier. 17 His initial architectural experiments strongly reflected the principles of international architecture. 18 Yet, in subsequent years he became aware of the disparity in the architectural development of the two interacting cultures. Regardless of possessing a cultural heritage and an architectural legacy of great value, he stated, Baghdad was suffering from the disadvantage of not having experienced the Renaissance and was subjected to numerous destructive invasions along its history, which caused it to lose the cultural status it once enjoyed and by interacting with the modern movement it experienced a direct consequence of a cultural gap. 19 He further explained that this gap cannot be bridged by policies of ‘narrow regionalism, vernacularism, or nationalism because of the characteristics of the internationalisation of modern culture’. 20 Likewise, he rejected the naïve internationalism and opposed the aspiration of a single universal architectural style due to his belief that cultural diversity is a necessary human attribute. 21 His theoretical solution was to ‘synthesise concepts gleaned from the international avant-garde with abstract forms derived from tradition’ 22 and described this approach as regionalised international architecture where regionalism would lose some characteristics of its inherent isolation and gain universalised concepts. 23 He further elaborated that Iraq must possess its regional technology before it can have its own architecture, and this should emerge as a natural outcome of a diverse range of ongoing experimentations in response to social need. 24 However, his built designs in Baghdad embrace both modern building forms and technology, and at the same time refer to, or directly imitate, traditional architectural components that were originally built using indigenous technologies. It can therefore be argued that, similar to architects such as Jorn Utzon and Mario Botta, the cultural differentiation in Chadirji’s designs is achieved primarily on a formal level. 25

Ouroussoff , Nicolai. ‘When Iraq looked West’, Los Angeles Times Nooraddin, Hoshiar. ‘Globalisation and the Search for Modern Local Architecture: Learning from Baghdad’, pp. 59-81.

19 Chadirji, Rifat. Concepts and influences, p.41 20 Chadirji, Rifat. Concepts and influences, p.41 21 Chadirji, Rifat. Concepts and influences, p.43 22 Isenstadt, Sandy, and Kishwar Rizvi. Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century. p.91 23 Chadirji, Rifat. Concepts and influences, p.51 24 Chadirji, Rifat. Concepts and influences, p.43 25 Hagan, Susannah. Taking Shape: A New Contract between Architecture and Nature 17 18

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An illustration from The Four Books of Architecture

by Andrea Palladio and a Palladio photograph combined with drawings of A. Hanna Residence in Baghdad designed by Chadirji in his book

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Another traditional house design by Chadirji, gleaned and abstracted from regional influences

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Façade fenestration photograph of a 19th century traditional house next to another of a 20th century office building, combined with Palladio’s Villa Barbaro in Chadirji’s book

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The Tobacco Monopolies Administration, designed in 1965 by Chadirji, further elucidates his primarily formal interest in tradition as he undertook an international approach to office design. The exterior façades possesses the appearance of traditional Iraqi forms; however, the interior layout of the building is a linear one with office spaces organised along corridors. It is favourably accepted that the beauty of traditional Baghdadi architecture largely relates to the dialectical relationship between indoor and outdoor functions, which is characteristic of the city’s urban life. Chadirji’s separation between the interiority and exteriority of his designs exemplifies the schizophrenia that is characteristic of the modern culture, but not of the Baghdadi one.

The modern life that he advocated sought to transform collective experience into a series of fragmented and privatised events. The facades of the buildings address the industrial world of technical reproduction, whilst the interior is responsive to the individual. 26 Such architectural realism demonstrates an act of acceptance of modern life and its technical form, believes too much in what is already known and not enough in what is yet unknown. This does not come at a surprise since Chadirji had rejected the manualaesthetic mode of production and valued the mechanical one. His concepts and methodologies are reminiscent of the work of architects like Adolf Loos. 27 Whilst traditional structures were a source of inspiration for his architecture, canons of Cubism, such as De Stijl, transformed his designs to formal sculptural abstractions. He did indeed possess a rather liberal spirit in abstracting from history in comparison to his contemporary Iraqi architects 28 as he did not copy exact formations and was not bound by traditional principles of proportion or composition either. The historical forms were reduced to geometrically simple volumes, a hint, an essence that had little or no physical similarities to his designs. The stronger the abstraction of tradition the easier it was for him to merge it with what he described as the universal spirit of the age.

K. Michael Hays, Assemblage, No, 8 (Feb., 1989) pp. 104-123 K. Michael Hays, Assemblage, No, 8 (Feb., 1989) pp. 104-123 28 Herrle, Peter. and Stephanus Schmitz. Constructing Identity in Contemporary Architecture, p.159 26 27

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The Tobacco Monopolies Administration

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Chadirji’s theoretical methodology can be further demonstrated in an example taken from the layout of his book Concepts and Influences. He shows two fireplaces and a ceiling that he designed for several clients in Baghdad, and as influences on their designs, he displays a sixteenth century Iranian book cover, a fifteenth century Afghani shrine interior, and a painting by Mondrian. This reveals that his synthesis methodology exists on the level of imagery that is contained within the matrix of modern technology and that his abstraction of historical forms as an art of reconstruction and recreation causes them to lose their meanings. 29

Upon comparing Chadirji’s work to a well-known architectural design like Tadao Ando’s Water Temple, similarities can be found in the sense that a typological idea has been abstracted to the point where it is unreadable as ‘Japanese’ except for the most informed observers. 30 Although Japan is a technologically advanced culture, the architecture in this example is still tipped in favour of the continuous field of modernism over the regional disparate elements. 31 This discloses an important question; how far can local architecture be tipped in favour of modernism and still be identified as local or regional? The regional should indeed remain unique, but how different could it be within a modernist matrix that tends to dominate? Perhaps this balance is unavoidable, which is indeed what Chadirji believed when he explained that regionalism can become a constituent of international culture, a factor of variety within the universal, and that regionalism cannot reverse this relationship because of the cultural gap concept. However, this gap seems to exist even within the most technologically developed non-Western cultures like Japan.

29 Nooraddin, Hoshiar. Globalisation and the Search for Modern Local Architecture: Learning from Baghdad’, in Yasser Elsheshtawy (ed.) Planning Middle Eastern Cities: An Urban Kaleidoscope in a Globalizing World, p. 73 30 Hagan, Susannah, p. 125 31 Hagan, Susannah, p. 125

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The layout of Chadirji’s book, one example to elucidate his theoretical methodology

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It is essential to state that whenever Chadirji discussed the issue of the cultural gap or the indigenous building technologies in Iraq, he used the word ‘primitive’ to describe the deficiency in the culture of Iraq. According to Adrian Forty in Primitive, the Word and the Concept, the negative connotations associated with this word is in fact a modern invention. Since the time of Vitruvius to the nineteenth century, the word ‘primitive’ meant ‘at the origins’, or ‘original’ as for example in primitive Christianity, and never occurred to describe early structures like tents and huts. 32 Adolf Loos, in his 1908 Ornament and Crime, is believed to be the first to draw upon a notion of the primitive that is far from the one in neoclassical theories. This modern usage hinges on evolutionism, on the superiority of the civilised West over the uncivilised, cannibalistic and heavily decorated other. Loos turned the primitive into a concept that is both atavistic and exotic, but also threatening. Instead of being a model to emulate, it became a warning against cultural degeneracy. 33 Furthermore, upon assessing Chadirji’s architecture in relation to The Theory of the Novel by Georg Lukacs, it is clear that his beliefs are not influenced by any anti-capitalist notions, which are essentially a reaction to modernity and are often associated with nostalgic, romantic conventions. 34 Chadirji appears to have been a modernist at heart, who provided answers to the demands of Cubism, despite his attempts to be faithful to tradition. Kenneth Frampton would agree, however, that the dominance of the field of modernism over regional architecture is unavoidable, which is a conviction that radical traditionalists in the Middle East, like the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, or his European contemporary Leon Krier, could never welcome.

32 Odgers, Jo. Flora Samuel, and Adam Sharr. Primitive: Original Matters in Architecture, 33 Odgers, Jo. Flora Samuel, and Adam Sharr. Primitive: Original Matters in Architecture, 34 Lukacs, Georg The Theory of the Novel.

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A painting by Mondrian and photographs of reed huts found in the marsh regions of Iraq, abstracted and combined in one of Chadirji’s residential designs in Baghdad

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Irrespective of what Chadirji proclaimed, it can be argued that Baghdad did in fact experience a limited period of architectural renaissance that is demonstrated through the brickwork innovation in the city’s residential houses between 1920s and the late 1950s. That was before the use of concrete in buildings became universal, when other countries were using stone, stucco and wood for building materials. This has ensured synthesis between native construction traditions and their interweaving of multiple vernaculars in the wake of art nouveau, art deco, and other ‘neo’ styles carried over from Europe. 35 The art of brickbuilding and ornamentation was initially brought to its peak by the Sumerians and Assyrians, followed by the Abbasids who built on the original techniques, which were carried into the 20th century. The British were experts with the use of bricks and had previously experimented with it in the harsh Indian climatic conditions; hence, their expertise benefited the ustahs of Baghdad and their architecture. 36 The ustahs are the thousands of master masons who built several magnificent structures and monuments ever since the great age of building in Mesopotamia and, later, to the Islamic Abbasid era, yet they remain largely anonymous in history. 37 The title was applied to all those who became masters of a certain craft after a slow process of training and apprenticeship that had no basis of formal education. It might take anything from twenty to thirty years for each to reach a high level of craftsmanship and gain the title, which was a source of tremendous pride and honour, after being recognised by his peers and local community. In Baghdad, most of them tended to come from poor social backgrounds and the most deprived districts of the city. 38 Their demise was signalled when the westernisation of the Baghdadi society began to manifest itself through the imposition of new western ways of life, including educational and political systems, laws and regulations, urban planning techniques and industrial production. This major upheaval in the socioeconomic and technological infrastructure had a direct impact on traditional architecture. The Baghdadi courtyard house, whose plan only changed slightly over five thousand years, was swiftly replaced by modern residences with copied styles from imported catalogues. 39

Pieri, Caecilia. Baghdad Arts Deco: Architectural Brickwork, 1920-1950. p. II Pieri, Caecilia. Baghdad Arts Deco: Architectural Brickwork, 1920-1950. p. I 37 Fethi, Ihsan, The Ustas of Baghdad, in Pieri, Caecilia. Baghdad Arts Deco: Architectural Brickwork, 1920-1950. p. 7 38 Fethi, Ihsan, The Ustas of Baghdad, in Pieri, Caecilia. Baghdad Arts Deco: Architectural Brickwork, 1920-1950. p. 8 39 Fethi, Ihsan, The Ustas of Baghdad, in Pieri, Caecilia. Baghdad Arts Deco: Architectural Brickwork, 1920-1950. p. 9 35 36

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Top: Sculpted detail in the precinct of Mustansiriya School in Baghdad, built by the Abbasids in the 13th century.

Bottom: Sculpted detail, underside of a balcony in Karrada neighbourhood of Baghdad, end of 1920s

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The local ustahs did initially adapt their great craftsmanship to the new technologies and innovated in the detailing of the brickwork. However, the spread of the use of cement and reinforced concrete as building materials during the 1950s and the arrival of the European-trained Iraqi architects and civil engineers led the ustahs to be replaced, and most of them had either died or retired by the 1970s. 40 Accordingly, the traditional Baghdadi house was given a class specification through its association with the proletariat ustahs in addition to being inaccurately linked with the patriarchal notion of veiled Muslim women. In contrast, the modern house with its relative transparency became correlated with the upper and middle classes, and associated with the liberation of women and society in the name of modernity. This presumed formal differentiation between two binary opposites, the traditional house versus the modern house, which carries within it social dichotomies, between the civilised versus the uncivilised, perpetuated and legitimised the modern movement in the postcolonial Baghdadi society and alienated the working class under the conditions of modern production. This was also reinforced by the avant-garde ideology and its deterministic model of progression that presented technological advancement in terms of its historical inevitability and irreversibility. 41 The utopian ideals of modernism and the appraised social significance of the transparency that shattered the bourgeois claustrophobic interiors of 19th century Europe were not necessarily transmitted to Baghdad and certainly did not mark a break with the city’s tradition. In fact, it proved to be contradictory, particularly when the high concrete fences began to materialise around the extroverted modern houses in order to regain the lost familial privacy, which destroyed the porous spatial relationship between the public and the private and further isolated the house. In fact, the social body grew more locked into the interiority of structures instead of being dispersed into the city.

Fethi, Ihsan, The Ustas of Baghdad, in Pieri, Caecilia. Baghdad Arts Deco: Architectural Brickwork, 1920-1950. p. 9 41 Benjamin, Walter. On The Concept of History.

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The high concrete fences of modern houses in Baghdad

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It is to be noted that when Warren and Fethi approached the historiography of the Baghdadi house, they concluded in their renowned research that it was established in the 13th century and continued to develop ever since. This conclusion was based on the earliest available material evidence they could find, which was an illustration by al-Wasiti, who lived in 13th century Baghdad, showing two-story dwellings with a central open courtyard and balconies projecting to the alleys or the river. 42 Consequently, this was accepted as a historical truth by succeeding architectural historians and associated with the Islamic tradition when analysed. 43 However, it can be argued that this concept of an interior space organised around a central open courtyard stem in part from the harsh climatic conditions that prevail in the region and can be traced back archeologically to pre-Muslim periods, all the way to Mesopotamia in 2000BC, 44 and comparable structures can be found in Ur, Nineveh and Babylon. Furthermore, the presupposition that female agency has to take a certain shape adheres to common stereotypes that veiled women are oppressed and forced to cover themselves, a notion that falls within mainstream Western feminism and is another form of imperialism.

An eventual reassessment of these dwellings after the destruction of many of them stimulated society’s consciousness to return in a nostalgic manner to the past in search of its individuality. 45 However, what has been discussed earlier indicates that the authorship of this building typology cannot be clearly defined and is indebted to related discourses, which are themselves diverse and form nodes within the network that constitutes culture. Yet, the courtyard house became an embodiment of the Baghdadi architectural and cultural identity, and Iraqis today still evoke with nostalgia this type of dwelling, in the appealing search for a romantic tradition, which provided each person with ownership of her/his own piece of the sky. 46

Warren, John. and Fethi, Ihsan. Traditional Houses in Baghdad.

Ani, Raya In the Shadow of Segregation p. 31 44 Pieri, Caecilia. Baghdad Arts Deco: Architectural Brickwork, 1920-1950. p. 26 45 Architect Mohamed Makiya worked with his students to document traditional courtyard houses and their details.

46 Pieri, Caecilia. Baghdad Arts Deco: Architectural Brickwork, 1920-1950. p. 26 42 43

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Illustration by al-Wasiti of 13th century Baghdad

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Pattern of street life in Baghdad

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A transitional house with balcony introduced into the shanashil

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Ruins There is nothing to prevent the sorrow: Those houses were wiped out or almost.

Pride and might abandoned them.

Near their doors you may see children playing; You may meet women quarrelling, But all that remains of the houses is here.

Their ghosts are fading, Their looks withdrawn in silence.

You left them between two illusions And took refuge in silence.

You never gave them any option but death, And waited for them to die.

Here they are now, opening their windows.

- Did you see?

Here they close them in fear And die.

Sami Mahdi (12 June 1978)

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Snir, Reuven. Baghdad: The City in Verse. p.266

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Cinemas in Baghdad

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An Elegy for al-Sindibad Cinema 48 There is a road Decorated by ceilings the memory has washed Till it became white, beneath a sky that reached the peak of its burning, where I walk; my words want to ascend like castle’s stairs Like voices climbing a lost scale A note after another In my friend’s notebook, the oud player, my friend Who died, because of his silence, in exile’s loneliness.

I locate this voice, find the building And open a door.

Our time, how it lost its tickets!

It runs in darkness like a small waterwheel, Made voices of those who do not have a voice!

They told me…

That al-Sindibad Cinema had been destroyed!

What a pity!

Who will now sail on? Who will meet The old Man of the Sea? Those evenings were destroyed…

Our white shirts, Baghdad summers, Spartacus, the Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Samson and Delilah, How will we dream about travelling to any island?

Al-Sindibad Cinema had been destroyed!

Heavy is the watered hair of the drowned person Who returned to the party After the lamps were turned off, The chairs were piled up on the deserted beach, And the Tigris’s waves were tied by chains.

Sargon Boulus (2008)

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Al-Sindibad Cinema was established in 1952 at al-Sa’dun Street and was closed following the American occupation 49 Snir, Reuven. Baghdad: The City in Verse. p.266 48

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Al-Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad

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A Letter to al-Mutanabbi (Street) How very right you were. Your words are still Wings of lights, Always carrying you to us (sometimes carrying us to you) Your name is a green tattoo On Baghdad tired face.

Your street a forehead On a head cut every morning.

This is another chapter In the saga of blood and ink You knew so well.

I cannot lie to you, Oh sir.

I’m quite pessimistic.

We are still here, Engraving On the walls of this cave, Which is stretching to thousands years of long, Signs we kept reinterpreting And myths about a world Where we don’t devour one another, Where the sun is friendly And the seas don’t complain from fever.

And… Some of us are digging A deeper grave About to embrace us all.

They have nice engravings, Maps, philosophers, and books.

But we can only keep Dreaming of a shore for the wind, And dig wells In the dark With nails of silence and solitude, And weave on ocean of ink For our myths, And out of words on sail Or a shroud vast enough for us all Every book is a well From which we drink To your health, Learning how to live With death And after it!

Sinan Antoon (2007) 50

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Snir, Reuven. Baghdad: The City in Verse. p.266

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One Thousand and One Nights

Baghdad once offered pleasurable streets with phantasmagorical visions and beckoned the stroller through its labyrinthine chaos with a sense of urban vibrancy that had nothing to do with modern construction methods and materials. Such liveliness can be ascribed to what was experienced as a permanent tendency towards public life that celebrates the everyday, 51 which was embedded into the written poetry about the city’s ceremonial spaces and travelled across time to remain meaningful within the shared collective life of its listeners. This demonstrates that communal experiences are entrenched in social tradition and connected with historical memory. In modern times, however, this experience has fallen in value and seems as if it will continue to fall into bottomlessness, particularly during the most recent chaotic decades when even journalistic accounting of events was forcefully divorced from everyday experiences and their very brevity. 52 Al-Sindbad Cinema and the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad are two of the urban centralities which the poets recorded in verse as intrinsic institutions of the city’s cultural power. However, it is al-Mutanabbi Street that epitomises in its physical and social structures the indicated experiential urban vibrancy of Baghdad.

It is the historic hub of the city’s bookselling, a winding street filled with bookstores and outdoor book stalls as well as the infamous Shahbandar Café, which was converted in 1917 from a printing house, due to political reasons, to become the meeting point of philosophers and writers. To walk through the street is to spend hours browsing books, chatting with the haggard and pale faced booksellers, listening to their humour, tales, and dreams to grow into publishers. It is not a mere street in an urban centre, but an irreplaceable part of the city’s memory and is often referred to as the heart and soul of the Baghdadi literacy and intellectual community. The area around the street itself was the old Abbasid district of scribes’ market and booksellers’ arcades numbered in the hundreds, which also housed cultural and educational institutes. 53

51 Nooraddin, Hoshiar. Globalisation and the Search for Modern Local Architecture: Learning from Baghdad’, in Yasser Elsheshtawy (ed.) Planning Middle Eastern Cities: An Urban Kaleidoscope in a Globalizing World, p. 75 52 Boyer, Christine. The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments. p.23 53 Al-Musawi, Muhsin, Al-Mutanabi Street in Baghdad, in Beausoleil, Beau. and Shehabi, Deema (eds.) Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, p. ix

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The physical and social structures of al-Mutanabbi Street, and the interior of Shahbandar Cafe

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On 5 March 2007, a car bomb exploded on the street, killing sixtyeight people and injuring more than a hundred others.

Consequently, a coalition of poets, artists, writers, painters, booksellers and readers was created to preserve this singular, tragic event in society’s consciousness due to its deep historical and cultural implications. 54 The street has reopened and books are being sold again, although many of the booksellers were killed and several of the survivors amongst them left the place. This catastrophic event is reminiscent of the chief tragedy that took place in 1258 with the Mongol invasion of Baghdad, which led to enormous destruction of libraries and intellectual life in particular. It was extensively recorded in history as the “great destruction” when “books of knowledge were burnt” and that the enormous quantity of books thrown into the Tigris changed the colour of its water to black.

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Beausoleil, Beau. and Shehabi, Deema (eds.) Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, p. vii

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The aftermath of the bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street

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The architectural qualities of Al-Mutanabbi Street extended to its neighbouring Al-Rasheed Street, which was constructed in 1914 by the Ottoman administration as a modern avenue to facilitate transportation within the city and to improve commercial trade in the central area. 55 The traditional narrow streets network of the old city fabric was no longer suitable for carriages, as such; alRasheed Street was paved regular, straight and wide. Its central part was designed for carriages and the sidewalks, shaded by colonnades or arcades, for pedestrians. The building codes and land regulations of that time followed the law system that was established by the Ottoman administration in 1869. 56 However, following the First World War, the British colonial administration and successive national authorities of Iraq, both royal and republican governments, gradually and systematically replaced the Ottommon system of law, primarily with elements of the British legal system but also from other Western ones. 57 Indeed, this facilitated the Iraqi market for the benefits of British interests and the global capitalist economy.

Nooraddin, Hoshiar. Globalisation and the Search for Modern Local Architecture: Learning from Baghdad’, in Yasser Elsheshtawy (ed.) Planning Middle Eastern Cities: An Urban Kaleidoscope in a Globalizing World, p. 65 56 Nooraddin, Hoshiar. Globalisation and the Search for Modern Local Architecture: Learning from Baghdad’, in Yasser Elsheshtawy (ed.) Planning Middle Eastern Cities: An Urban Kaleidoscope in a Globalizing World, p. 63 57 Nooraddin, Hoshiar. Globalisation and the Search for Modern Local Architecture: Learning from Baghdad’, in Yasser Elsheshtawy (ed.) Planning Middle Eastern Cities: An Urban Kaleidoscope in a Globalizing World, p. 64 55

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Al-Rasheed Street, in 1913 and 1937

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The Iraqi Development Board, an eight-member autonomous administrative body, established in 1950 to manage the extensive program of economic and urban development, wanted to counter the control of the British by inviting international architects to design for Baghdad. An examination of the involvement of those architects in the city demonstrates, particularly according to Mina Marefat who has conducted an eloquently chronicled PhD research about this subject, that the rhetoric provided by Frank Lloyd Wright to accompany his plans for Baghdad displayed a unique sensitivity to the opportunities presented to him. 58 However, her research is exclusive to the work of international architects in contrast to each other and not in comparison to local Iraqi architects. Similarly, Hoshiar Nooraddin and Magnus Bernhardsson, leading experts on the architectural development in mid-twentieth century Baghdad, critically discussed Wright’s work without drawing specific parallels between his approach in particular, and the international architects’ in general, to the methods undertaken by local Iraqi architects within the same timeframe. On the other hand, Iraqi architectural critic, Kanan Makiya, placed all of the ‘early moderns’ within the same brackets: “By contrast [to Mohamed Makiya], the early moderns (Le Corbusier, Gropius, Wright, Mies van der Rohe) wanted to cut out the past, deface it and start all over again from first principles”. 59 Mohamed Makiya is a pioneering Iraqi architect and educator who viewed Iraq as a synthesis of its several pasts. Architectural historians, even his critics, acknowledge his fundamental contributions to the architectural scene of Baghdad, but discuss his work solely in comparison to his other Iraqi and Arab counterparts. This phenomenon is an example of what Jorn Rusen referred to as 'the widespread logic of exclusion in favour of a more inclusive manner of historical self-understanding'. 60 The aforementioned explanation of the non-comparative historiographical approaches to the architectural history of midtwentieth century Baghdad presents the opportunity to conduct a comparative analysis of two different cultural perspectives of the city, yet possesses similar historical thinking that relies on using history as a medium for identity formation.

58 Marefat, Mina ‘Wright's Baghdad’ in Anthony Alofsin (ed.) Frank Lloyd Wright: Europe and Beyond, pp. 193.

59 Makiya, Kanan. Post-Islamic classicism, (London: Saqi Books, 1990), p. 139 60 Jörn Rüsen, History and Theory, Vol. 35, No. 4, Theme Issue 35: Chinese Historiography in Comparative Perspective (Dec., 1996), pp. 5-22

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The first cultural perspective, exemplified in Makiya, is of a specific method undertaken from within the spatio-temporal dimension of Baghdad, while the second, demonstrated in Wright, is of an approach that tackled the context of the city from an external position. History, or historical consciousness, is a mixture of these two viewpoints, as such; a comparative approach to historiography will offer a more critical understanding of the cultural orientation of the present though revealing another layer of the past.

Wright and Makiya belong to two contrasting cultures and different generations. Their personal interactions occurred only few times in Baghdad over the period of two weeks in May 1957 when the city was witnessing its most prosperous period for the first time in nearly 700 years. That was due to the remarkable improvement in the quality and pace of the architectural activity in Iraq as a direct result of the substantial increase in the country's oil revenues. Makiya met Wright at the Al-Ruward art exhibition before touring him around Baghdad in his car and later having him, Walter Gropius and several other architects at his home for dinner. When Makiya was asked decades later about his impression of Wright he stated that Wright was “very bossy�. 61 60F

Frank Lloyd Wright and Makiya in the black suit on the left

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"Arts and Culture from the Middle East." Bidoun (2009): 56-58.

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Indeed, when approaching mid-twentieth century Baghdad, they both returned to tradition as a basis for their architecture and identified their historic sources as key elements in articulating the cultural identity of Baghdad. According to Cohen's recent critique in the Wall Street Journal, Wright possessed great admirations for the Islamic culture, articulated in the Abbasid dynasty and the two ancient Assyrian and Sumerian civilisations, 62 whereas the synthetic combination of the Abbasid, Seljuk, Safavid civilisations served as the main source of inspiration for Makiya. Furthermore, Wright spoke of the importance of “what is sound and deep in the spirit, and what genuinely belongs to the Iraqi people”, while Makiya was more interested in the parallel notions of the 'aura' and believed that ancient ruins possessed it.

It is essential to inspect history in search for architects and thinkers, which Wright and Makiya might have shared as a joint source of reference. They can both be described as pioneers within their individual contexts, and while Makiya was straightforward about his concepts and influences, Wright's attempts at the end of his career to rewrite the record, in order to convince himself that he stood alone against the world, makes it difficult to substantiate his affiliations and commitments in regards to architectural theory. 63 The historic overlap of Wright’s and Makiya's timelines occurred in England, particularly in the Cotswold of Chipping Campden, and although they never met personally in the actual place, it was there that specific events influenced their rational in similar ways.

In 1910 Wright visited his only friend in England, Charles Ashbee, whom he had met for the first time in 1901 in Chicago, and corresponded with him during the period in between. When Wright visited Chipping Campden, Ashbee, who was significantly influenced by John Ruskin, tried to enthuse him about the crafts and traditions of the English vernacular. Wright was evidently influenced by his visit to Ashbee considering that after his return he made the first move towards establishing Taliesin. Moreover, he chose to locate it in a village in Wisconsin instead of Chicago where his residence was at the time. 64

A Cohen, ‘Frank Lloyd Wright 'builds' Baghdad’, The Wall Street Journal, 20 August 2003, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB106134829466963700.html (accessed 24 November 2014).

63Saint, Andrew, ‘Wright's Baghdad’ in Anthony Alofsin (ed.) Frank Lloyd Wright: Europe and Beyond, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999, pp.125.

64 Saint, p. 127 62

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Comparatively, as a student in England in the 1940s, Makiya admitted to having been influenced by Ruskin who held the firm conviction that a building reached its prime after five centuries and ought to be designed with this in mind. 65 In that belief, Ruskin scraped at the subliminal psychological impulse that lurks inside the dead form of every building. Makiya was inspired by him even though he was an ambitious young architect coming from a newly independent country so profoundly cut off from its past.

During his university years, Makiya established an interest in brick detailing and when students were asked to perform drawing exercises, he used to draw the elevation of Cotswold villages whereas everyone else drew up a cathedral or a church. His contemporaries, whether English or Iraqi, had no interest in tradition according to him. Consequently, he had to play the role of the modernist so he could prove himself to be a good designer.

He studied architecture in Liverpool University, finished his Ph.D. in Cambridge and spent eleven years in England all together. 66 According to Andrew Saint, during the period of the Second World War when Makiya was in England, architecture students in Liverpool and the Architectural Association became politicised and more of them were demanding social relevance to their projects. It was not modernism or the so called International Style that was being clamoured for, but a socially directed modernism.

Throughout these highly tensed times, Wright visited England briefly for a lecture series, where he praised the buildings of the English Cotswold, even after nearly forty years of his initial visit.

This is yet additional evidence that demonstrates the positive impression the English Cotswold had on him.

Makiya, Post-Islamic classicism, p. 22 Hoshiar Nooraddin, ‘Globalisation and the Search for Modern Local Architecture: Learning from Baghdad’, in Yasser Elsheshtawy (ed.) Planning Middle Eastern Cities: An Urban Kaleidoscope in a Globalizing World, Routledge, London, 2010, p.

74.

65 66

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Ashbee wrote about Wright in his journals on regular basis, and although he did not particularly praise his architectural style, he unquestionably admired his design principles. It is noted by Alan Crawford in his article that examines their correspondents, that Ashbee's journal entries appears to witness the forging of one of those links that connect the Arts and Crafts movement to the modern one. 67 The Arts and Crafts movement was one that stood for traditional craftsmanship, applied medieval, romantic or folk styles and has been described to be essentially anti-industrial.

Indeed, Wright did build on the movement's respect for natural materials and predilection for informal living spaces considering the fact that he was quoted saying to his guest in Taliesin “Johnstone, we got it all from Lethaby, you know�. 68 Lethaby was an architect and theorist associated with the Arts and Crafts movement and this saying, however, was possibly a casual piece of flattery, trotted out for an impressionable English visitor. 69 Wright's anti-Ruskinian manifesto 'The Art and Craft of the Machine' was produced nine years before Wright's first visit to Ashbee in the Cotswold of Chipping Campden. Hence, his influence by Ruskin followed his criticism of him. In fact, Wright wasn't against the machine, but against the removal of its natural interpreter; the artist. Ruskin extolled the work ethic, believed fiercely in the dignity of the working class, and pleases passionately for the right of each working man to create beauty on his own terms. According to Rosenberg, Ruskin was actually Wright's link to the romantic tradition and that much of Wright's work in architecture, as well as his architectural theory, is an attempt to realise this Ruskanian sense of nature. 70 Moreover, Richard Wilson, who wrote about the architectural relationships between Chicago and the Arts and Crafts movement, elucidated that Wright had established an idealised grasp of Ruskin through reading and was attentive to the American Arts and Crafts debates. It can be suggested that Ashbee's admiration of Wright's architectural principles was after all because he reminded him of Ruskin's morality.

67 Crawford, Alan. (1970) Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Robert Ashbee Architectural History Vol. 13, pp. 64-76+132 68 Saint, p. 124 69 Saint, pp. 124-125 70 Rosenberg, John D. The darkening glass: a portrait of Ruskin's genius. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963.

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A close investigation of the two architects’ drawings and design methodologies reveals their shared visual relation to dead artefacts from distant pasts. Makiya was utterly uninterested in dates, names, places and events. He used to endlessly collect photographs, generate and recycle images from the past. 71 Even later on when he assumed the role of the teacher, he encouraged his students to collect photographs and measure the elevations of historic buildings in Baghdad. The gathered images get worked and reworked, cropped and re-cropped, scaled up and down to create a new composition. Likewise, it can be argued that Wright also possessed a visual relationship to the complexity of his site in Baghdad over multiple scales of observation. In his Baghdad Opera House, for instance, he developed the inter-penetrating circles as a formal theme that shaped the entire building and its site plan, which he viewed as conscious means of blending architecture and landscape. This organisational principle was the ziggurat, which is an ancient Mesopotamian form that Wright had used for modern means. He also designed a 300 foot high ziggurat statue that he based it on visual references to the tower of Babel and the minaret of the Mosque of Samarra. 72

Makiya, Kanan. Post-Islamic classicism, (London: Saqi Books, 1990) M Marefat, ‘Wright's Baghdad’ in Anthony Alofsin (ed.) Frank Lloyd Wright: Europe and Beyond, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999, pp. 193.

71 72

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Wright’s Opera House and Ziggurat statue, next to the ancient minaret of Samarra

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Makiya’s designs adjacent to ancient sites

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In The History of Philosophy, Benjamin states that “thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts, but their arrest as well” 75 where the placement of the ‘movement of thoughts’ beside ‘their arrest’ demonstrates a ‘dialectical’ relationship between two images or entities. Additionally, he insisted on ‘the arrest of the flow of thoughts’, which exposes knowledge that ‘flashes up at the moment of its recognisability’. This notion, when related to the visual and proportional methods used by the two architects to approach tradition, suggests that certain dialectics within the flow of history of Baghdad crystallised into forms that can be constructed as immediately present and identified as belonging to both the present and the past. These contents that transformed and transitioned from a previous historical condition into a present one can be described as anachronistic. Nagel and Wood constructed their definition of 'anachronic' in two categories, 'substitutional' and 'performative'. The first is what is constantly rebuilt, so that the original material is gradually replaced, while the whole maintains the titular inscription of itself. Such objects exist in a chain of substitutions in order to maintain their original 'identity'. They contextualise the material substitution in which a historical event in the present is absorbed and understood in relation to a historical event in the past, both legitimising each other as events within a non-chronological understanding of time.

However, the 'performative' stand against these substitutional works and is a 'caesura' on the linear timeline. As such, the interplay and tension between the 'performative and the ‘substitutional' create a series of works that are 'anachronic'. 76 This suggests that the historical contents and characteristics that Makiya and Wright believed to be fit to incorporate into their projects and modern agendas contribute to the formation of an anachronic identity of Baghdad. However, assuming this position may require an 'experimental thought' of the use of the term substitutional, in the sense that it does not necessarily refer to complete finished objects, but rather to historic ruins or objects that possess what both architects referred to by the words 'spirit' and 'aura'. This is an important point since the two architects were against copying from the past, but rather transmitting certain parts of it that belong to the present as well.

Benjamin, and Arendt. Illuminations.

Nagel, Alexander, and Christopher S. Wood. (2010) Anachronic renaissance. New York: Zone Books; Print.

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The aforementioned comparative analysis revealed how the architecture of Makiya and Wright, their theoretical concepts and links to the Ruskanian notions within the Arts and Crafts movement, demonstrate that they both possessed a moralistic desire to create humanistic architecture while adopting authentic dialectical relations with tradition and holding on to the ideals of liberation that were established by the early modern movement.

Theoretically, they individually constructed critique of the universal modernism and welcomed a more dialectical relationship with nature, in contrast to the more abstract avantgarde. The architectural notions they firmly believed in complement the theoretical concepts of Critical Regionalism advocated by Frampton. This is manifested through their acts of distancing themselves from the Enlightenment myth of progress by avoiding the optimisation of advanced technology, and also from the reactionary unrealistic impulse to return in a nostalgic manner to the pre-industrial past. However, their methodologies unravel Wright's Orientalism, beyond Said, and Makiya's Occidentalism, beyond the Arts and Crafts movements.

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“The commission from Baghdad to build an Opera House is an agreeable surprise and I am pleased to join Iraq in a Twentieth Century enterprise… To me this opportunity to assist Persia is like a story to a boy fascinated by the Arabian Nights Entertainment as I was… I cannot tell you how pleased I am to serve my feeling for the Orient again… With my sincere appreciation of the great opportunity held out to me by Baghdad Iraq” Frank Lloyd Wright 77

77 Marefat, M ‘Wright's Baghdad’ in Anthony Alofsin (ed.) Frank Lloyd Wright: Europe and Beyond, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999, pp. 193.

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Image of the fabled city

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Love We fell in love with Baghdad when we were young; only being middle-aged were we lucky to meet her.

We approached the water of the Tigris, unparalleled; we visited the noblest trees, the date palms.

We quenched our thirst, without ever gratifying our desire; what a pity, nothing in this world will survive.

Abu al-‘Ala’ al-Ma’arri (approx. 1000) 78

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Snir, Reuven. Baghdad: The City in Verse. p.143

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From the 2003 military invasion of Baghdad

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Wars Once upon a war I took a quill Immersed in death.

I drew a window On the war’s wall And opened it, Searching for tomorrow, Or for a dove, Or for nothing.

But I saw another war And a mother weaving a shroud For a dead man Still in her womb.

Sinan Antoon (2010) 79

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Snir, Reuven. Baghdad: The City in Verse. p.305

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National Museum of Iraq, located in Baghdad

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A Sorrowful Melody The tanks of malice wander.

My wound Is turned away like an abandoned horse Scorched by an Arabian sun, Chewed by worms.

Picasso paints another Guernica, Painting Baghdad under the feet of boors.

Freedom is a lute Strummed by a nameless dwarf.

Paintings in Baghdad’s museums Are at the mercy of the wind.

The Assyrian smiling bull is frightened.

Forced to leave, he is confused and weeping.

In the museum’s corners and bends, Sumerian harps Played a sorrowful melody.

Bushra al-Bustani (2008) 80

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Snir, Reuven. Baghdad: The City in Verse. p. 291

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Bombed out street in Baghdad

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Baghdad, February 1991 Along these bombed-out streets my baby carriage was pushed.

Babylonian girlspinched my cheeks and waved palm fronds Over my fine blond hair.

What’s left from then became very black.

Like Baghdad and Like the baby carriage we moved from the shelter During the days of waiting for another war.

Oh Tigris, Oh Euphrates – pet snakes in the first map of my life, How did you shed your skin and become vipers?

Ronny Someck 81

81

Snir, Reuven. Baghdad: The City in Verse. p. 291

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One of Saddam’s countless statues in Baghdad

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Hulagu Oh Hulagu of the present time, Remove from me the sword of oppression, You are a melancholic person, Tragic, Aggressive.

You do not distinguish between my blood and The points of ink.

Su’ad al-Sabah (1999) 82

82

Snir, Reuven. Baghdad: The City in Verse. p. 272

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The Thief of Baghdad

Baghdad is one of the few cities in history to have been ruled for more than two millennia exclusively by its conquerors, 83 perceived by the West with nuances of myth and legend, and often confused with the ancient kingdom of Babylon. The image of Baghdad with its little known urban context is overcast by the utopian world of One Thousand and One Nights, which has completely vanished from its present reality. 84 As demonstrated previously, Wright was evidently influenced by the Arabian Nights of his youth that inspired his vision and drawings for Baghdad, which reflected orientalised and mystified references to those ancient tales. 85 His words describing his projects remain the most detailed account of his designs, which were dismissed later as anachronistic and fantastic. Likewise, Saddam’s dictatorship functioned for almost thirty years as a smokescreen image, which distorted the perception of the city and its tradition to the most twisted extremes. 86 Iraq, as a state under his dictatorship, had unsuccessfully tried to impose an identity from above, whether ideological, religious, dynastical, or power-centric, with the forced European model of territory-based national identity, while unable to build a nation to begin with. 87 One of the primary historical circumstances that prefaced Saddam’s presidency was the nationalisation of oil that took place in 1972, which increased the government’s spending on construction projects, particularly after the establishment of the National Council of Engineering Consultancy a year earlier. 88 Subsequently, tradition became a vital issue in the late 1970s as a consequence of large scale urban development and road construction that caused the destruction of significant components of the historic fabric of the city. 89 In the following years, Iraq underwent three destructive regional wars and Baghdad became also known as the city of Ba’athist architecture whose construction processes were heavily controlled by the central authority of the Ba’ath party government, led by Saddam Hussein and his extreme propagandistic motives.

Chadirji, Rifat. ‘Iraq, Or The Country and People That Became Modern Iraq’ in Caecilia Pieri Baghdad Arts Deco, p. 5 84 Pieri, Caecilia. Baghdad Arts Deco, p. I 85 Isendtadt and Rizivi, p. 111 86 Pieri, Caecilia. Baghdad Arts Deco, p. I 87 Kumaraswamy, P R. Who am I?: The identity crisis in the Middle East. Middle East Review of International Affairs 10 (1), pp. 63-73 88 Khaseer and Naser, ‘Modern Architecture in Planning the City of Baghdad’, Planning and Development Journal p. 11 89 Nooraddin, p. 71 83

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The interplay of war and peace has long been one of the most important characteristics that shaped Baghdad throughout its history and its architecture is evident of the phenomenon where form follows the political power system. 90 The space between culture and politics began to shrink ever since the fall of the monarchy as a direct consequence of the revolution of 1958, which was followed by mass movements, political experimentations and two military coups in 1963 and 1968 that eventually brought the Ba’athist party into power with its panArab nationalistic ideology. 91 All nationalisms seek national homogeneity and a common denominator. Nonetheless, unlike ones based on language or race or religion in most cases, Iraq’s paradigmatic nationalism has long been based on ever-shifting ideas and cultural paradigms. Its fluidity made it easy to vacillate and manipulate by Saddam, 92 following the footsteps of Hitler and Stalin, which are two of the most predominant examples that demonstrate how architecture can be used to distort social and cultural identities. The University of Baghdad, together with its School of Architecture, was nationalised shortly after the revolution of 1968 as the Ba’athist government did not wish to allow students to have an independent architectural education.

Likewise, all architects educated in Iraq were forced to work for the government in exchange for a relatively low salary compared to the cost of living. These extreme conditions created a black market where young architects worked for existing architectural firms without any credit for their designs except payment. Indeed, this unfair system had negative effects on the architects’ creativity and the development of local architectural knowledge. 93 Chadirji was thrown into the infamous Abu Ghraib prison after being sentenced to a life-long imprisonment because he received commissions from British architectural firms. 94 He spent his time in the darkness of the prison drawing and writing until he was dragged twenty months later to the presidential palace in his prison fatigues. Saddam had ordered his lieutenants to bring him Iraq’s greatest architect to prepare Baghdad for an international conference. Chadirji fled to Beirut a few years later and eventually settled in London. 95 Similarly, Makiya found asylum in Britain to set up the architectural practice of Makiya Associates in London and ran it with his son Kanan Makiya, an architect and a political critic who was at the time also running campaigns to protect the Iraqis from Saddam’s operations of radical persecution that were heading towards genocide. 96

90 91 92 93 94 95 96

Nooraddin, ‘Globalisation and the Search for Modern Local Architecture.’ p. 71.

Nooraddin, ‘Globalisation and the Search for Modern Local Architecture.’ p. 71.

Isendtadt and Rizivi, p. 83 Nooraddin, ‘Globalisation and the Search for Modern Local Architecture.’ p. 72.

Jamal Jassani, Architect from the Beautiful Age Baghdad Al Arabiya, ‘Famed Iraqi Architect Rebuilds Baghdad Landmark’, Cohen, What’s Left? How the Left Lost Its Way, p. 24

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Saddam wanted to institutionalise himself as an immortal power and cement his presence in history by creating the sense that there could never be a viable political alternative, and to have this principle set in stone, bronze and concrete. 97 The tyrant sweated under the weight of his own self-image and pursued an outward expression of his imagined greatness. He was a relentless builder with a grandiose taste for elevated scale 98 who incorporated historic themes from the heritage of Iraq into his personality in the process of legitimising his own rule 99 and restructuring the fragile Iraqi identity to immortalise his persona. He ordered large monuments to be built in the city’s major intersections in order to invoke a gratified ultra-nationalistic propaganda and forestall a glorified future under his leadership. He gave Baghdad its greatest facelift in living memory by forcing its urban form and circulation patterns to adapt themselves around the larger of his edifices that displayed his supremacy. Public spaces became institutionalised sites of power, marked by the authoritative presence of the tyrant’s artefacts as spectacles of terror, as well as being haunted by the absence of the fabled city of One Thousand and One Nights. This tyranny exemplifies in an extreme sense the Foucauldian notion of how power is productive of the knowledge that regularises and isolates individuals in order to implement control mechanisms that force the subjects into compliance. 100 The city and its urban space as a whole tied together, reinforced and expanded the forms of disciplinary control and psychological surveillance that ran through the whole social body, which were produced within the specific sites of power.

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97 The Economist, ‘Monumental’ The Economist, vol. 350, no. 8109, 04, March 1999, pp. 77-78.

98 Makiya, The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, p. 11 99 Bernhardsson, Reclaiming a Plundered Past, p. 216 100 Jeremy W. Crampton, Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography.

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Countless billboards around Baghdad incorporated Saddam into historic narratives to cement his presence in history and social consciousness

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Countless billboards around Baghdad incorporated Saddam into historic narratives to cement his presence in history and social consciousness

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The regime proceeded with the Ba’athisation of Baghdad, committed populist distortions of the country’s cultural heritage and treated the concepts of local tradition with absolute recklessness. 101 Additionally, the large funds that were accumulated over the couple of decades that preceded Saddam’s authoritarianism became available to him to force the people into devastating regional wars, which were extensions of his local policies of terror and suppression. 102 By 1984, four years into the conflict with Iran, the costs of war were significantly increasing, causing a crisis of political legitimation and threatening the collapse of the economy, which prompted Saddam to micromanage monument construction himself in an effort to consolidate identity. 103 The Victory Arch, for example, was commissioned in 1985 and constructed under his close supervision. The gigantic arms were worked from plaster casts of Saddam’s arms, taken from above the elbow with swords inserted in both hands that reach an apex of forty metres above ground level. This Ba’athist monument was built to be a superior equivalent of the Arch de Triomphe in France. 104 Additionally, the monument holds five thousand Iranian helmets obtained fresh from the battlefield and placed in nets, 2500 helmets in each. The swords were sculpted from raw steel acquired from melting the weapons of Iraqis who died in the battlefield. 105 The Victory Arch was commissioned several years before the deemed victory in the war, at a time when there was none in sight.

The conflict had taken much longer than Saddam had anticipated and he knew that he could not achieve the intended objectives that he initiated the war to accomplish. 106 This structure exemplifies the physical manifestations of his totalitarian power in the urban fabric of Baghdad, which is an integral factor in the formation of the cultural and the social structures. He intoxicated Iraqis and the regional communities with the propagandistic image he had created and claimed to have the nation’s interests at heart, yet he did not even develop the country’s factories to sufficient standards to allow local production of his monuments.

The arms of the Victory Arch, for example, were cast at the Morris Singer foundry in England. 107 This monument is perhaps the most predominant reflections of the pop, kitsch and vernacular aesthetic found in Saddam Hussein’s projects. 108

101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108

G Johnson, ‘History of Iraq: 1947 – 1963’ CARDRI, Committee Against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq Roy, ‘Saddam's Arms’ Makiya, The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, p. 3.

Makiya, The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, p. 3.

Makiya, The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq p. 60.

Makiya, The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq p. 4.

Roy, ‘Saddam's Arms’

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The Victory Arch in Baghdad

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In 1983, Robert Venturi and other world-renowned architects, including Muhammad Makiya, were invited by Saddam Hussein to participate in one of the grandest architectural competitions ever sponsored in a Third World country. 109 The brief was to design a mosque that symbolised the religious state and represented a leap forward in architecture. 110 Baghdad had become a testing ground for the new post-modern aesthetics and, apart from the architecture itself; the competition was an orchestrated event of national proportions, three years into the war with Iran and four years after the Iranian Islamic revolution. 111 In contrast to modern architects like Wright, who would not have expected from the start to be understood only by other elites, post-modern architecture is rather about forms that are easily relatable. 112 Saddam’s need to use popular culture to serve his political agenda was a tactic antithetical to that of Warhol, Oldenburg, Bofill or Venturi, 113 and ‘when a Pop architect attempts to celebrate tyranny in the style of Disneyland, a very strange dialectic of space and time is created that, however hybrid, eradicates both West and East, both regional identity and the international style, both Dadaism and the art establishment’. 114 None of the proposed schemes for the competition were good enough for Saddam and he ordered the six competitors to work together and redesign a joint scheme under his guidance. Venturi refused and left Baghdad furious. 115 Ironically, everyone ought to be thankful that neither Venturi’s design nor Makiya’s dream for the Baghdad state mosque was ever commissioned. The architectural value of this massive project and the meaning the architect had intended would have been swamped by the propagandistic construction process due to the political realities of that period. 116 The Iraqi society was being ravaged by a destructive war against an Islamic revolution and accordingly the design would have been filled up again by Saddam with political publicity whose spirit is derived from the Victory Arch. 117

109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

Makiya, The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq Roy, ‘Saddam's Arms’ Makiya, The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq Makiya, The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq Roy, ‘Saddam's Arms’ Makiya, The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq Makiya The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Makiya, Post Islamic Classicism, p. 127.

Makiya, The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq

p. 60. p. 60. p. 64. p. 64. p. 66. p. 66.

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The magnitude of human losses and destruction that resulted out of the eight years of conflict with Iran was reminiscent of the First World War. 118 Nameless and faceless Iraqis paid their lives and fortunes to sponsor a war they were forcefully driven into, resulting in one and a half million casualties. 119 The most tragic comedy of this period was the fact that Saddam spent a billion dollars between 1991 and 1996 to rebuild his palaces and even construct new ones. 120 He spread his colossal sixty five palaces throughout the country demonstrating what absolute wealth and power can render. Baghdad never lived up to the romanticism of its name. Its allegorical legacy of being a beautiful low rise city with minarets puncturing its blue skyline was gone forever.

Instead its skyline was now dominated by Saddam International Tower, scaled to be taller than London’s Post Office Tower to demonstrate superiority to Western powers. The tower was completed in 1995, built to show resistance to economic sanctions and to demonstrate an anti-West ideology that had become the fundamental principle of the Iraqi identity by that time. 121 17F

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Illustration by Robert Venturi for the competition

Committee against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq CARDRI Committee against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq CARDRI 120 Nooraddin, p. 78.

121 L Vale, ‘Mediated monuments and national identity’ Journal of Architecture, vol.

4, no. 4, 1999, pp. 391-408.

122 Robert Venturi’s drawing for the competition is illustrated above 118 119

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The nineties in Baghdad were undeniably strange beyond measure. The Ba’athists had committed one of the most devastating genocides of the twentieth century. They had started the longest controversial war of the whole of the twentieth century. They had invaded Kuwait and been defeated in battle.

They had harboured international terrorists and organised terrorism themselves. They had developed weapons of mass destruction and used them against domestic and foreign opponents alike. 123 Baghdad was completely transformed into Saddam’s 'Theme Park' by the late 1990s, a city of architectural chaos and damage. 124 Saddam’s Baghdad Style was not of the earlier modernism transplanted from the West, nor the latest post-modern aesthetic of the architects who enthusiastically participated in the redevelopment of Baghdad. It was one that truly celebrated the Ba’athist City 125 where the physical immediacy of its public monuments ran deeper than any propaganda campaign. Saddam was the architect and the client, building for his image with no cultural responsibility. 126 As such, the culture of Baghdad had become the culture of Saddam.

In addition to the destruction caused by his own actions, the bombing that took place during the international sanctions was aimed at museums and cultural sites where his monuments were purposely placed in order to send a threatening message to him. 127 By summer 2003 the Victory Monument was out of bounds with its perimeters, surrounded by tanks and Humvees, in a city that stood fragile once again. Saddam’s image has been shattered, yet his monuments still stand. Sustained pain and institutionalised cruelty of the kind that Iraqis have experienced in the last three decades is a threat to reason and a healthy social structure. Atrocity of this kind defies simple reflection and analysis, is emotionally draining and incapacitated intellectually.

In a bid to escape these consequences, a society often seeks to excise itself of whatever reminds it of the past, or escape into nostalgia and a desperate search for lightness and relief. Thus monuments are ripped up from the roots as mementos of a past that people desperately want to forget. 128 The political turmoil placed additional layers of meaning onto the metaphorical image of Baghdad and highlighted its spectacle as being a “disfigured princess” and an “object” of remorse.

123 124 125 126 127 128

Cohen, What's Left? How the Left Lost Its Way, p. 72.

Vale, Mediated monuments and national identity, pp.391-408 Makiya, The Monument p. 31.

Vale, Mediated monuments and national identity, pp. 391-408.

Bernhardsson, Reclaiming a Plundered Past p. 216.

Makiya, The Monument p. XIV.

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The April 2003 toppling of Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square in Baghdad shortly after the Iraq War invasion

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Salute to Baghdad Put your coffee aside and drink something else.

Listening to what the invaders are declaring: “With the help of God, We are conducting a preventive war, Transporting the water of life From the banks of the Hudson and Thames To flow in the Tigris and Euphrates” A war waged against water and trees, against birds and children’s faces.

From between their hands A fire emerges in nails whose heads have been sharpened, The hands of the machine pat their shoulders.

The air weeps Borne upon a cane called called earth, Dirt turns red and black, In tanks and mortar launches, In missiles – flying whales, In time improvised by shrapnel, As volcanoes shoot out their liquid lava into space.

Move, Oh Baghdad, on your punctured waist.

The invaders were born in the lap of a wind that strides on four legs, By the grace of their private sky, Which prepares the world to be swallowed by The whale of their sacred language.

It is true, as the invaders say, As if that mother sky Only eats her children.

Do we all too have to believe, Oh invaders, That there are prophetic missiles bringing the invasion, That civilisation is only born from nuclear waste?

Old-new ashes under our feet: Oh misguided feet, do you realise the abyss Into which you have now descended?

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Our death now resides in the watch’s hands.

And our sorrows desire to fix their nails In the bodies of stars.

Woe to that country to which we belong.

Its name is silence, and nothing is there except pains.

And here it is full of graves – frozen and moving.

Woe to that land to which we belong, A land swimming in fires, Its people like green firewood.

How glorious are you, Oh Sumerian stone.

Your heart still beats with Gilgamesh.

Behold he is getting ready to go down again, Looking for life, But his guide, this time, in nuclear dust.

We closed windows After we had cleaned their glasses with newspapers that report on the invasion, After we had thrown our last roses on the graves Where are we going?

The road itself no longer believes our steps.

A homeland almost forgets its name.

Why? A red flower teaches me how to sleep In the laps of Damascus?

The fighter eats the bread of the song.

Don’t ask, Oh poet, for nothing but disobedience Will awake this land.

Adonis (31 March 2003) 129

129

Snir, Reuven. Baghdad: The City in Verse. p. 240

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Parting

Architectural modernism in Baghdad sought to provide formal solutions, deemed utopians, to social, economic and political problems, which sought to recover human totality through an ideal synthesis of embracing urban disorder through order, which proved to be socially and politically regressive. 130 It converted the previous unconscious principles of construction into a conscious historical task filled with the utopian desire to be modern and progressive. The traditional Baghdadi houses are the product of a long period of evolution, incorporating qualities and characteristics which are the distillation of generations of experiences and inventions, of climatic influences, lifestyles and craft traditions. As such, the rhetoric of architectural modernism that calls for sweeping away all traditional construction methods through comprehensive interventions on the part of architects is naĂŻve. Furthermore, the presupposition that female agency has to take a certain shape adheres to common stereotypes that veiled women are forced to cover themselves, a notion that falls within mainstream Western feminism and is another form of imperialism.

Social emancipation requires a collective consciousness-raising practices that emerge from within the culture itself to confront the everyday practices and the material history of male domination within the private and public spaces, and it cannot be achieved by reductionist, imported formal methods of modernisation and assumed liberation. The answer is in seizing hold of the advocated technological revolution and placing it in the service of the social body and building on the material culture that is epitomised in the dialectical relationship between indoor and outdoor functions, which is characteristic of the city’s urban life. Additionally, the theoretical and interdisciplinary rearrangement of knowledge in relation to questions of power and culture is required, which would seek not a new formalistic solution, but a more integrated and selfreflective approaches in the design process and scholarly study of Baghdad. 131 130 131

Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development.

Edward W. Said. Orientalism,

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Wright and Makiya’s work in Baghdad shared fundamental common efforts to mediate the impact of universal modernism and its globalised space with elements derived from the particularities of the local tradition in order to create specific places. This point, although critical, is yet a paradoxical one. Paul Ricoeur posed this contradiction in his book History and Truth of how to be modern and return to the historic sources at the same time, which is suggestive of the polarisation of today's practice of architecture.

Universalisation can indeed lead to technical and economic advancement, yet it could result in further destruction of the creative traditional nucleus of the great culture of Baghdad and the spread of mediocrity within it. 132 Although the analysis of their anachronistic methodologies unravelled Wright's Orientalism and Makiya's Occidentalism, the two architects’ ideological visions are incredibly powerful in their potential capability to unite modernday Baghdad's religious factions and ethnic tribes, with an identity that is neither parochial nor confessional, but rather a territorial one that encompasses the distinctiveness of the place by providing expressive architecture that can become a source of pride for communities.

The context specific tension between architectural radicalism and conservatism became more apparent as the discussion progressed. The pure abstract forms of modernism, much favoured by post-independence generations of many places as that which escapes the stamp of colonialism, also triggered antagonism in its refusal to blend into any contextual, ethnic or traditional elements: a two-edged sword that characterised many exchanges between dominant and subordinate cultural powers.

Though the utopian world of One Thousand and One Night has no real space, it continues to have a general relationship of direct or inverse analogy with the real space of society. Similarly, the image of Saddam has been shattered, but his powerful edifices remain, embedded with ideological notions reminiscent of his institutionalised cruelty. These psychic forces of the dichotomous collective images of Baghdad, ones of dream and others of terror, are still held sway over the spectator’s subconscious and inhibit anything new from occurring. The reality of the earthly city must be accepted for what it actually is instead of veiling it with the image of a utopian or a dystopian Baghdad. The task, however, is not to overcome the past as it survives in today’s material culture, but to redeem the utopian traces within what is accepted so profoundly as given perceptions. The notion of history as a linear, progressive sequence of events must be rejected and the past instrumentally reconstructed as a separate period of time, in order to achieve for the present independence and critical awareness, which is essential for Baghdad.

132

Ricœur, Paul. History and Truth.

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95

In Baghdad, Where My Past Generation Would Be Where are you, my first years, Years of streets and cafes, Years of days and long walks, In the course of revolts with no picking of conscience?

Where are you, my first years?

Oh my city, feverish with floods of memory, Where are you in that drawn stream?

How can I write to you, From the balcony to the water, To restore to you seasons more remote than the two rivers, To bookstores of boiling pavements, To air-conditioned halls and concepts?

Oh my first years, years of a city Where we used to drink the future in frightened gulps, A city whose face is now polished with bullets.

With sunset the light used to come to her, To spread above her roofs shadows and reflections.

The sky was shattered into stars to illuminate darkness, And from cafĂŠ to cafĂŠ, We would search in the south of the unknown, For the light of the north and write the hours In antique notebooks of the invisible.

We invented windows through which the other would Penetrate beyond the fence.

We would long for their spaciousness and for a whiff of breath.

Where are they, my years spent strolling between days, the poets of temporal rest?

Who promised you the death of dawn and mint Whereas the well of their achievements Is nothing but the verbosity of jammed sentences?

Oh God, if only they had been just once in the bed of the unknown, Time would not have spared us a generation.

It would not have spared their odes the warmth of blood.

Oh years of white phantom, Ghost of invented years, The tide rises; the emotions augment.

Resistance is blind, And you are immersed in thoughts.

What can I do with a memory That cannot be but a memory?

What can I do with a past that is afraid of births, Living only in the depths of those who have died, Dying only in the clatter of those alive?

Abul Kader El Janabi (2004)

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