Reshaping Baghdad: warfare and utopian fancy
A study by an English PhD scholar suggests links between utopian revamping of Baghdad and recent, more radical incursions into the city by the West.
Robyn Walton’s work on the visions of a prominent architect and an artist and author of last century show they thought nothing of rebuilding the city according to their own grand schemes.
In 1957 the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned to design an opera house for the city. He got so carried away with ideas of Islamic splendour that he sequestered an entire island and drew up a design resembling a Disney theme park.
In this, he re-used motifs of the ancient architecture of the city, yet imposed his own ideas of an elaborate ‘emblematic’ arts complex on the city, Ms Walton told a recent English symposium.
Similarly, the British modernist author-artist Wyndham Lewis invented a parable in 1919 in which a section of the city was razed and then rebuilt on Vorticist lines. Vorticism was a British art movement formed by Lewis and a small group of colleagues and orbited briefly by literary luminaries like Ezra Pound and T S Eliot.
Lewis’ 1927 painting ‘Bagdad’, shows a vision of the city – which he never visited – as a mythological conglomeration. It includes a spiral staircase reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s architecture, in a heaven-directed array that accentuates intricacy and diversity.
The design of the staircase was based on spiral minarets such as those of the Great Mosque at Samarra in Iraq.
Audacity of the author
‘One feature that stands out in each of these speculative ventures is the audacity of its author,’ Ms Walton says.
‘He prescribes purgatives and tonics in a fashion we could describe as drastic action. Closer inspection reveals a deal of conservatism, nostalgia, elitism and anti-democratic sentiments generating this unsparing willingness to propose large-scale and sudden change.’
Lewis and Wright held the ancient civilisations of the East in high esteem. They sometimes confused ancient Persian culture with the Arabic Islamic culture centred on Baghdad.
‘As the dates suggest, much drastic utopian-dystopian thinking about destroying and reconstructing cities reaches the public domain immediately aft er or before major warfare and shift s in political power,’ Ms Walton said.