The starting point for this work was the curious fact that the Grady Grammage Auditorium at the University of Arizona was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and originally intended to be built in Baghdad. In the 1950's, King Faisal II of the newly oil rich and independent Iraq commisioned the greatest Modernist Western architects of the time to create designs for a new Baghdad. Alongside Wright's designs were those created by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Alvo Aalto and Gio Ponti, though none of the designs were built at the time because of the military coup which overthrew King Faisal II's monarchy in 1957.

I found this fact extremely interesting because I been looking at Wright's work, specifically his Imperial Hotel in Tokyo from the 1923. Wright is a unique case; though he is seen as one of the great exponents of Modernist architecture in the 20th century, his approach does not follow the top-down, Modernizing development strategy employed by fellow Modernists practicing the International Style like Le Corbusier. Instead, he follows a bottom-up, 'archeo-urbanistic' approach which takes into account the vernacular architectural traditions, archeological history, folklore of the culture for whom he is designing to create environments which are determinedly 'retrospective, imaginative and reconstitutive.' His only two overseas commission in his career, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and Plan for Greater Baghdad are historically situated and 'fantastical' in the sense that they do project a utopian aspiration for an 'ideal' Baghdad which is a confluence of the ancient, Mesopotamian history of the land on which it is built and the modern Islamic culture it now embodies. In this sense, Wright's designs do align with the utopian aspirations of Modernism, yet it is the divergence with its ideology which makes it particularly relevant at the moment. Where Wright produced a fantasy for the royal regime of Iraq which perpetuated its influence into the past and future, the designs of Le Corbusier, Gropius, Aalto and Ponti were essentially Modern, Western designs which embodied the values of technological determinism and instrumental rationality and did not take into account the local conditions or history of the city but instead imported a cool, rational and mechanistic account of the future aligned with the post-war Western values of the time. And it is in this future that their vision came to bear, when the Royal dynasty was toppled by the military regime of Brigadier General Abdul Karim Quassim, it was the International Style of Le Corbusier, Gropius, Aalto and Ponti which was preferred for the new secular, nationalistic military regime of the B'aath party which would control Iraq until the US invasion in 2003. In fact, it was Saddam Hussein who recommissioned the realizations of the designs by Le Corbusier for a sports stadium in the 1980's, thus perpetuating into the latter part of the 20th century the strange affinity between Modernist architecture and fascism which occurred in earlier parts of the century.

The construction of the new US embassy in Baghdad which employs a fortress-like structure makes certain statements about the US presence in the city. Expressed in the mundane, architectural 'post-modernism' of the American shopping mall and McMansion it creates a monument to US imperial ambitions in the region as well as clearly admitting no alternative to the endless sectarian violence plaguing the country that necessitates the continued US military occupation of the country. Where I see an out from the closed narrative offered by the architecture of the US embassy in Baghdad comes from the Google Earth project in which users create 3-D virtual models for buildings in cities which are then added to its collection of online maps. One particular model that drew my attention was created by Chris Bence for a future Baghdad police station. With the enthusiasm of a gamer, he describes how 'I wanted to add towers so I decided to give them an Islamic touch as the new Iraq will be much less secular than under Saddam,' while he makes the comment that 'with rivals like the Mahdi army, the Iraqi government has more to worry about than petty thieves.'

This is the model I follow, envisaging a new Baghdad in the spirit of Wright using the online interfaces provided by Google, that takes the past, present and future into account and (re)creating key buildings in the city. I have created designs and models for a series of new buildings for Baghdad, which though fantastic at this point in time, at least create a hopeful future counter narrative to that of the present day.