Plan for Greater Baghdad
The most thoroughly developed aspects of the plan were the opera house, which would have been built on an island in the middle of the Tigris together with museums and a towering gilded statue of Harun al-Rashid, and the university.
The deal negotiated in the first years of the decade with the Western-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company, which held a monopoly on oil exploration and development, increased the government's share of revenues substantially.
As the government, headed by King Faisal II, developed a general scheme for the capital, it determined to call upon world-famous architects—mostly Westerners—to participate in the modernization of the city.
[1] Numerous prominent Western architects were invited to Iraq on government commission, including Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, and Wright.
On his visit, Wright instead selected an island in the middle of the Tigris as his site; the area was at the time undeveloped as only recent flood-control measures had made it suitable for construction.
At the north end of the island, Wright envisioned a 91-metre (300 ft) statue of Harun al-Rashid built of gilded sheet metal and placed on a spiraling base resembling the Malwiya Tower at the Great Mosque of Samarra.
In additional allusions to the local culture, the building is topped with a statue of Aladdin holding his lamp and a spire which Wright intended to represent the "Sword of Mohammed.
The spiraling ramp appears memorably in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and also in unbuilt projects such as the Gordon Strong Automobile Objective and the Point Park Civic Center.
While visiting Baghdad he gave a speech to a group of Iraqi engineers, in which he contrasted the “spiritual integrity” of the Eastern world with the materialistic, commerce-focused society of the West.
He implored them not to let architects come to the city and “put a cliché to work,” and recommended that they connect with “what is deep in the spirit.”[13] Levine observes that Wright's attempt to incorporate major elements of the city's history local culture stands out in comparison to the designs for Baghdad produced at about the same time by other prominent Western artists like Le Corbusier and Gropius: "the other invited Westerners proposed buildings that were in essence the same as they might have designed for their home countries, which in fact many originally were.
Wright's familiarity with local history and culture was limited, and Nicolai Ouroussoff argues that the decorative camels, the Aladdin statue, and other such features made the plan “an embarrassing example of Western chauvinism.”[15] Levine describes Gropius's one nod to the setting, a domed mosque, as “an Orientalizing pastiche of Saarinen's Kresge Chapel at MIT.”[16] A cynical perspective might posit that, while Wright evidently made an effort to consult the city's genius loci, he may have succeeded only in creating a patronizing appeal to four thousand years of tradition.
