KuiperCliff has a nice piece on Frank Lloyd Wright's late designs for Baghdad.
A colleague reminded me today that the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright had been involved in plans to modernise the Iraqi capital Baghdad, located on the plain between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. He visited the city in May 1957, as an old man nearing his 90th birthday, and, inspired both by Arab and Persian art and architecture, began to draft a series of blueprints for a new city...Read.
Lloyd Wright’s “Plan for Greater Baghdad” was drawn up over the course of several months following his visit, and his romantic vision drew heavily on the myth and memory of Harun al-Rashid, the 8th century caliph under whom Baghdad rose to pre-eminence as the regional cultural and political capital in the Islamic period. That Baghdad was destroyed in 1258 by the Mongols, but has remained alive in the Arab memory ever since...
1 comment:
Hi Helmut,
I wonder what other examples there are of well-known architects being involved in similar plans? There must be plenty in the very recent past, but I'm thinking a bit further back. In fact, the early post-colonial period is probably full of such examples.
With the benefit of a time machine, we could perhaps mix up the time frames a bit. I'd love to see what Inigo Jones might make of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (Nebuchadnezzar - "Mr. Jones, my wife feels they're just too formal"). How different London might have been if Le Corbusier had been contracted to undertake "a bit of light renovation" after the Great Fire of 1666. Rem Koolhaas building La Sagrada Familia?
In the fertile literary ground that is sprouting speculative sub-genres like clockpunk, perhaps there's mileage in this revisionist architecture thing?
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