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Those who know a little about Baghdad, and a little about modern architecture, may already know that preeminent figures of early modernism, such as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, designed architectural proposals for the city around the middle of the 20th century. Many may be surprised however to discover that several other important international architects were involved with Baghdad at one point or another in its recent history, hoping to erect some remarkable structures that would have transformed the city beyond recognition. A recent exhibition at the BSA Space, home to the Boston Society of Architects, titled City of Mirages: Baghdad, 19521982, brought together some of these proposals and presented the work of Alvar and Aino Aalto, Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown, Walter Gropius, Jos Luis Sert, GioPonti, Alison and Peter Smithson, Constantinos Doxiadis, Ricardo Bofill, Willem Marinus Dudok, in addition to Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. The proposals on display were part of a travelling exhibition that was initially installed at the CollegidArquitectes de Catalunya (COAC) in Barcelona in 2008, before moving to the Center for Architecture in New York City in early 2012, and eventually landing in Boston. The BSA
TEXT + IMAGES AMIN ALSADEN

Space exhibition, which ran from October 2nd, 2012 until January 10th, 2013, featured thirteen architectural and urban proposals, covering a wide range of building types, such as housing, civic centers, museums, educational facilities and mosques, among others. Unlike conventional architectural exhibitions, the curators chose to exhibit the material in a very particular manner: as archival objects rather than museum pieces. The emphasis was not on the aesthetic merits of a particular drawing, or the conceptual position espoused by each proposal, but more on raw informational value that all proposals offered collectively. The visual material in the exhibition was laid out on equal terms with the accompanying textual description, all displayed in small panels organized in constellations that introduced each proposal. These undistinguished constellations pasted on the gallerys walls, along with the scale models distributed across the floor, constituted the specific curatorial strategy employed, which invited the visitor to study the material presented in its totality. Following a quick survey, the visitor could discern that out of the thirteen proposals on display, only three were built but then subsequently damaged or torn down, and three others were partially realized, while the rest remained ideas on paper. It soon dawned on the visitor that the exhibition told the history of a modern Baghdad that could have been, not the Baghdad that was. It also became evident that the title of the exhibition was not just a title, but more of a metaphor, an underlying theme, a larger phenomenon that the displayed material both pointed to, and in a way, also represented. The exhibition suggested a connection between the chosen title and a work by the pioneer of Iraqi and Arab modern poetry, Badr Shakir

BAGHDAD MODERNISM
DUPLICITY OF MIRAGES AND A CRISIS OF HISTORY

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al-Sayyab (1926-1964). His piece City of Mirages was the first text that the visitor read upon encountering the exhibited material: The years stretch out in front of us; blood and fire, I forge bridges with them; they become a wall... For ten years now I have not ceased walking; towards you, City of Mirages! Destruction of their life!. These verses set the scene for the exhibitions contents, repeatedly narrating the tragic story of how the displayed proposals were not realized because of political turmoil, and they also set the tone for what the exhibition itself stood for. Indeed, upon reflection, it became abundantly clear that the visitor was not simply apprehending the story of modern architecture in the city of mirages, but was also perceiving the many mirages latent in the exhibition itself, and was ultimately confronted by a larger crisis of history that was thinly disguised behind the displayed material. The idea of the mirage operates on numerous registers, and emerges in various guises. The exhibition itself can be thought of as a mirage, as a manifestation of something illusory, without content or reality. In that regard, the choice of material on display was very telling. Never original, the material presented consisted of facsimile reproductions of various archival documents that exist elsewhere. The curators seemed to have consciously chosen not to include photographs of what little has been realized. The strategy is understandable recent photographs of built projects could have proven disappointing, revealing the decades of poor maintenance, not to mention the damage these precious structures have undergone. Historical photographs would have been equally disappointing, largely because they would only depict the partially realized proposals, the half fulfilled dreams of architectural modernism; or

they would be sad reminders of the decline that has taken place ever since. Instead of photographs, the exhibition chose to present the proposals exclusively through typical means of architectural representation: drawings, renderings, models, and text. The exhibition, in other words, conveyed a vision for a potential Baghdad as strictly imagined by the featured Western architects. The exhibition was thus a secondary simulation, of a simulated Baghdad that was never attained. The mirage was experienced as a reenactment of a particular imaginary, one that produces satisfaction by distancing itself from the real, or from the reality of the city in question. The exhibition is also a mirage in the way it characterized Baghdad as a distant land of mirages, that is, in its conflation of the visual phenomenon of the mirage with Baghdad itself. The visitor is challenged to question this notion of the mirage, and is prompted to ask: to whom exactly is the city a mirage? How can a city be a mirage? And what gives it this distinctive quality? Whether the curators were cognizant of the fact or not, the message of the exhibition was precisely that: just as mirages in the desert disappoint the thirsty, Baghdad was a land of architectural opportunity that eventually disappointed those who perceived it as such. The exhibition did not necessarily address those who lived within the mirage city, whose lives were shaped and affected by the mirage city, or who actually built and modified the mirage city. It was primarily concerned with how Baghdad was perceived and valued from the outside, by the cohort of foreign architects mesmerized by the possibilities of building ambitious projects in the nascent oil-rich nation. The fact that most of their ambitions were thwarted, and that the history of architecture had to content itself with

a host of unrealized proposals for Baghdad, made the city a mirage for those looking at it abstractly from a distance. This distant reading, and the specific context that the exhibition considered, points out that Baghdad is also still being portrayed in the most traditional sense of what the mirage connotes: the Western imaginary of Arabia, the land of the desert, of scorching heat, of hallucinatory oasis, and thus of the very optical illusion of the mirage. After all, the word mirage is deemed more appropriate for cities like Dubai, Marrakesh, or Baghdad, than it is for Paris or Berlin the latter association would simply be considered ludicrous. The exhibition therefore conjured the mirage of Orientalism, a discourse that reduces the complex cultural, geographic, and historical diversity of the Orient to a manageable set of stereotypes

and utterances that have largely characterized Western engagement with the Middle East until recent history, persisting to a certain extent even today, as this exhibition testifies. The exhibition seemed preoccupied solely with a modernism whose protagonists are from the West, reaffirming the, by now widely challenged, canonical Euro-centric narratives of modernity, and overlooking the recent critical and revisionist approaches to inclusive international narratives of architectural modernism. Cursory mention of a few notable Iraqi modern architects, such as Rifat Chadirji, Muhammad Makiya, NizarJawdat, and Hisham Munir, did little in countering the fact that the exhibition showed no interest in what has actually taken place in Baghdad. It disregarded the unique local brand of modernism which distinguished the metropolis from its Middle Eastern counterparts, and which elevated it to an emulated model for emerging

Headquarters for the Development Board and Ministry of Planning | 1958 | Gio Ponti

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urban centers particularly in the Gulf region, where many Iraqi architects continued their careers as conditions in their home country deteriorated. The exhibition could easily be defended by its curators of course, who might have claimed that the show was aware of the existence of a larger picture, and that its focus on the famous Western architects working in Baghdad was entirely intentional. But it is precisely this distinction that is problematic. It is the conventional hierarchization or categorization of various modernisms by various agencies that perpetuates the customary divisive and essentializing narratives of modernity. What is most alarming, however, is not this exhibitions truncated understanding of the history of built form in modern Baghdad. What is distressing is the realization that besides this delimited approach, there is perhaps very little documentation of the development of built form and its relationship to larger socio-political processes in modern Iraq. The idea of the mirage surfaces here again, lodged in the exhibitions value as an emblem for a larger crisis of history that lies beyond the limited scope of the material presented. The exhibition did hint at some of the reasons behind this crisis: it incessantly reiterated the history of turmoil, violence, and instability, and it pointed out the detrimental effect war and internal strife had on a complete understanding of the legacy of modernization in Iraq. But instead of these volatile circumstances serving as props for a rich historical record that chronicles the myriad events and milestones of the countrys recent past, they became excuses for a lack of engagement with historical scholarship, and a customary justification for the current knowledge vacuum. It certainly cannot be denied that historical scholarship is difficult to sustain during troubled times. But it is one thing

to have a destroyed city, and another to not have a record of the destruction. Most historical accounts of modern Iraq available today concern themselves with the political or economic history of the nation, paying little or no attention to artistic, architectural, or cultural developments. It is not necessary to make an argument here for the centrality of history to several crucial aspects of a properly-functioning modern society, from national identity and nation building (or nation rebuilding in the case of Iraq), to rigorous academic scholarship, or for the mere purpose of documenting a societys achievements to date, preventing it from lapsing backwards, and providing it with the milestones and impetus for further developments. But it is imperative to note that there is a collective responsibility for the preservation and recording of this history. That this exhibition attempted to put together a history of modernism in Baghdad is its redemptive merit it is an initial step toward an understanding of perhaps not the complexities of modernization in Iraq, but the enormity of the task of writing the actual complex history of modernization awaiting scholars. A history of modernization which simply documents the key actors, from political figures, to architects and planners, and their role in transforming modern Iraq (a strategy followed by traditional general histories) is inadequate. What is needed is an appraisal of what has actually been erected, how Iraqi society has produced and interacted with the new spatial realities, how it perceived the various institutions and monuments it built and inhabited - in short, how architectural modernism was lived and how it shaped Iraqi society, rather than the simple understanding of how it was brought

about. But considerable challenges present themselves in the context of Iraq when one begins to wonder how to write this history, when Baghdad has been mutilated over and again, when archives have been looted and burned, when the local educational and research establishment has been paralyzed, and when international scholarship continues to find little interest in probing topics related to local built form in Iraq. Indeed, the obstacle to historical work presented by these challenges seems insurmountable at times. Disturbingly, Baghdads deplorable contemporary reality may even begin to be conceived as the norm, rather than the exception. If other global cities have particular stereotypical identities, Baghdad has become synonymous with destruction, erasure, disappearance. Upon closer inspection, the idea of the mirage is not really that foreign to the city - it is perhaps the most appropriate metaphor for its recent existence.

In opposition to this notion, and perhaps in a direct response to it, the exhibition relayed yet another mirage to the visitor, which has to do with the hint of tacit optimism detected in its overall tone optimism that does not fail to betray an awareness of the sad reality of contemporary Baghdad. The exhibitions credits offered a glimpse of this mirage. Naming the Spanish Ambassador to Iraq from 2005-2008, D. Ignacio Ruperez, as the figure behind the whole initiative, the exhibition suggested the mixed feelings that external observers in Iraq must have experienced as they witnessed the realities of Baghdad a few years after the 2003 occupation: pity toward the countrys modern heritage and the destruction it has undergone, but also, and more importantly, a realization that a massive reconstruction campaign was to ensue in the very near future. After all, the timing of the exhibition was not arbitrary. The exhibition can be understood as both nostalgic,

Baghdad Opera House | 1957-58 | Frank Lloyd Wright

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the exhibition relayed yet another mirage to the visitor, ... tacit optimism detected in its overall tone optimism that does not fail to betray an awareness of the sad reality of contemporary Baghdad.
documenting the history of modern architecture in Baghdad at a time of extreme loss, but also potentially opportunistic, implying a possible resurrection of some of the displayed schemes, and envisioning a future for Baghdad along similar lines of (imported) development. And although the mirage lies in the bleak realities on the ground that promise no such scenario in the near future, that is, of an informed, massive government-led reconstruction effort with a clear vision for the countrys development (given the ongoing political impasse and the reported pervasive administrative dysfunction), the exhibition did succeed in insulating the visitor, at least temporarily, and inducing the faint sense of pleasure inherent in pondering an exciting Baghdad that could have been, distancing the viewer from fully realizing the crisis of history being obfuscated by the displayed material. The crisis, exacerbated by the series of mirages conjured, recalls the loss of a larger narrative, the history of numerous irretrievable episodes, ideas, agencies, enunciations, and objects. Revealing this crisis is not simply about lamenting the tragic reality of modern Baghdad and its emaciated, or even nonexistent, history; neither is it about suggesting that Iraqis, and the rest of the world, should resolve themselves to the inevitability of the current situation, and accept it as though an unalterable fate, or an acceptable and unique quality that characterizes the city; nor is it about extending an invitation to making predictions about Baghdads future, or to propose a propensity the city has for selfdestruction. It is instead an attempt to identify a problem, to highlight a grave and pressing situation that requires not just attention, but urgent action. The action needed, by Iraqis and the international community, entails addressing several fronts simultaneously: identifying whatever is left of Baghdads salient built heritage, modern or otherwise, protecting it from further damage; locating, collecting, and properly preserving whatever is available of historical documents to form a body of archival material that can begin to narrate the citys history; and most importantly, urging scholars, both within Iraq and outside, to work on grappling with the present challenges of the knowledge vacuum, and to work diligently on producing works that engage with the citys history. But above all, the action needed today entails a radical revision to the way built form is thought about and interacted with in the region. Built form needs to be accorded more reverence, and should be appreciated for its value as a historical record for both Iraqis and humanity at large. One has to remember that the main difference between Rome and Baghdad - both capitals of vast empires, built over several centuries, and whose legacies continue to influence the world - is that Rome became the Eternal City, the archetype of the historical urban record, with its built form encapsulating multi-layered, coexistent, and mutually enriching epochs; Baghdad, in contrast, was condemned to repeatedly losing the traces of its history, and thus part of its evidentiary claim to civilizational contribution. Not that there is much to be done about what has been lost to date, but to continue to treat lightly and dismissively the citys built heritage is to perpetuate a tragedy that must be brought to an end. Preserving and documenting the history of modern Baghdad in particular should not remain a mirage.