Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century

4. Baghdad’s Urban Restructuring, 1958: Aesthetics and the Politics of Nation Building

In August 1955 the Iraq Development Board, a quasi-governmental body overseeinganacceleratedprogramof nationalmodernizationintheyoung nation of Iraq, solicited the Greek architect and planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis to prepare an ambitious housing program for the entire country. ChairedbyIraq’spremierandsupportedbyWesternconsultants,theIDB had at its disposal the lion’s share of the country’s oil revenues (which increased dramatically in the early 1950s as foreign ownership of the Iraqi petroleum industry diminished), and it used them to fund the construction of dams, irrigation and drainage systems, power plants, bridges, roads, factories, schools, hospitals, and other buildings.1 Doxiadis was brought on board at the point in time when the IDB had decided to increase its emphasis on housing and community facilities, in an eªort to prevent social unrest by providing more visible signs of progress.2 The need for popular gestures of social reform seemed urgent because the increasingly unpopular Iraqi government, ruled by the Hashimite dynasty installed by the British in 1921, saw “uncomfortably obvious ” parallels between Iraq and Czarist Russia, and was nervously hoping to secure political stability in order to sustain itself. For similar reasons, British and American consultants also encouraged reform, hoping that Iraq, which wasseenasanimportantMiddleEasternbastionagainstCommunism,would not replicate the experience of Egypt, where a 1952 revolt had brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power, along with his Soviet-allied policies.3 Doxiadis’s initial charge was to create a comprehensive five-year plan for 97 4 Baghdad’s Urban Restructuring, 1958 Aesthetics and Politics of Nation Building panayiota i. pyla the improvement of housing conditions throughout the country, and his firm began with projects in Mosul, Kirkuk, Mussayib, and Baghdad. In 1958, while the firm was already engaged in the construction of various rural and urban housing schemes, it was also assigned the task of creating a new master plan for the rapidly expanding city of Baghdad. As the administrative capital of a new nation, Baghdad became the focus of the IDB’s activities. An earlier master plan, developed jointly by the British firm Minoprio & Spencely and P. W. Macfarlane in 1956, had instituted zoning principles and proposed the development of a system of roads to connect Baghdad’s premodern urban core to its new river bridges.4 Doxiadis Associates’ master plan aspired to provide a more comprehensive framework for modernization. By incorporating the pilot projects Doxiadis Associates had already launched in the capital beginning in 1955, the firm made a double promise that the new comprehensive restructuring would improve housing for all while providing the foundation for long-term urban and regional growth.5 This essay focuses on Doxiadis’s 1958 master plan for Baghdad. Moving from a dicussion of the overall master plan to the design and construction of specific housing units and public squares, the essay demonstrates how Doxiadis ’s conceptions of social reform and regional particularity, along with his technocratic postures of neutrality, became intertwined with the Iraqi regime’s aspirations to assert the young nation’s modernity and to nurture pride among its citizens. The goal is twofold: (1) to uncover how Doxiadis’s formal and social experiments were appropriated as vehicles for building a modern nation state, and (2) to simultaneously demonstrate that postcolonial Baghdad was a significant site in the larger rethinking of architectural modernism that characterized the post–World War II era. Since new visions for reconstructing Baghdad are once again becoming current, it is particularly important to put this recent history of the city in critical perspective. doxiadis’s appeal Doxiadis, who had been a Greek government o‹cial from 1945 to 1951, first as the coordinator of postwar reconstruction and then as the administrator of the Marshal Plan in Greece, was well known in American and international development circles, and he was recommended to the Iraq Development Board by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.6 Doxiadis was at that time taking his very first steps in establishing a private practice ,andeventhoughhehadlittletoshowintermsof independentbuiltworks (he barely had any staª when the IDB solicited him in 1955), he succeeded 98 Panayiota Pyla in securing this commission, which would soon become the stepping stone for his prolific international practice.7 What made Doxiadis appealing to the IDB was partly his Greek background that rendered him free of “imperialist stigma” and distinguished him from most of the other Western consultants, advisers, and technicians who were streaming into Iraq.8 Doxiadis’s appeal also stemmed from his planning approach, which he...