عربي المعرض المتنقل بعنوان مدينة السراب: عمارة بغداد من رايت الى فنتوري. يلقي هذا المعرض الضوء على المشاريع المعمارية التي جرى تصوّرها في بغداد في الخمسينيات والثمانينيات من القرن الماضي، أي في عهد الملك فيصل الثاني. حمل هذان العقدان أهمية تاريخية كبيرة للتاريخ المعماري للمدينة. فقد شهدا وجود وعمل بعض المهندسين المعماريين الأكثر تأثيراً في عصورهم، من أمثال فرانك لويد رايت، ولو كوربوزييه، وروبرت فنتوري، وريكاردو بوفيل وغيرهم في العاصمة العراقية. ولكن نظراً للتاريخ السياسي المتقلب الذي بدأ العراق يتعرض له منذ نهاية الخمسينيات، تم إهمال معظم هذه المشاريع ونسيانها حتى وقت قريب جداً. تقدّم هذه المشاريع المنسية صورة عن حياة بغداد وطاقتها في تلك الفترة، تختلف عن صور الدمار والعزلة الحالية.
City of Mirages: Baghdad, 1952–1982 presents built and unbuilt work by 11 architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Josep Lluís Sert, Alvar and Aino Aalto, and Robert Venturi FAIA. Models of various scales of the built and unbuilt work by these and other architects are accompanied by a large-scale model of Baghdad.
The history of modern architecture in Baghdad is not well known and remains relatively underexplored. Specialists in Iraq and in exile throughout the world have undertaken detailed analyses of the topic, but many of the studies have been difficult to access in Europe and the United States, and the destruction of war has made it impossible to recover the complete modernist record of Iraq. The exhibition describes an era in which Baghdad was a thriving, cosmopolitan city, and when an ambitious program of modernization led to proposals and built work by leading international architects.
قام بإعداد هذا المعرض البروفسور بيدرو أزارا بإشراف جمعية الإقتناء الكتالونية (COAC) في برشلونة عام 2012، ثم أصبح معرضاً متنقلاً عُرض في نيويورك، وبوسطن (معهد ماساتشوستس للتكنولوجيا)، ورام الله، وبغداد.
Mid-century greats like Le Corbusier, Wright, Sert, Gropius, Aalto and Gio Ponti were invited by King Faisal II in the 1950s to participate in the remaking of Baghdad’s modern image. Baghdad was back then a place of development, as the young King Faisal II—educated at Harrow in England and crowned in Iraq at 18—began to invest oil revenues from petroleum exports into infrastructure projects that would put the capital city back on the map. His short-lived reign as an idealistic teenage monarch may not have left much for the history books, but he did succeed in bringing in some of the world’s greatest architects to contribute to Baghdad’s urban plan.
From Frank Lloyd Wright’s fairytale Opera House and Alvar Aalto’s Museum of Fine Arts (both unbuilt) to Josep Lluís Sert’s US Embassy and Gio Ponti’s Development Board of Iraq headquarters (both still standing), the exhibition allows us to imagine what Baghdad could have been. The two biggest contributions were Walter Gropius’s University of Baghdad masterplan which now serves 30,000 students in 273 buildings, including Baghdad’s only skyscraper, clocking in at 20 stories. The other is an idealistic 1958 plan by Constantinos Doxiadis for low-income housing now called Sadr City. Sadly, Faisal’s death following a coup d’état in 1958 ended this utopian resurgence, but building continued through the ‘60s and then again under Saddam Hussein’s Office of Architecture and Urbanism, established in 1980, until the US invasion in 2004.
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