Baghdad, prairie style.The Wall Street Journal recently ran a column by Adam Cohen revealing that an ambitious scheme for renewing Baghdad had been gathering dust for nearly 50 years, a plan drawn up by Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1957 the aged architect had been invited by the Iraqi government to design a city opera house. Typically, Wright wanted to site his proposed creation (above) on an island in the Tigris. "The island is yours," King Faisal II told him. Wright also "designed an art gallery, botanical gardens, a 'grand bazaar,' and a university campus for the island," wrote Cohen cohen or kohen (Hebrew: “priest”) Jewish priest descended from Zadok (a descendant of Aaron), priest at the First Temple of Jerusalem. The biblical priesthood was hereditary and male. , even though the project had been awarded to rival architect Walter Gropius. As it happened, King Faisal's government was soon overthrown, and the island eventually became a Baathist resort. Yet Wright's unbuilt Baghdad retains a certain bizarre exuberance, its opera dome topped by a gilded gild 1 tr.v. gild·ed or gilt , gild·ing, gilds 1. To cover with or as if with a thin layer of gold. 2. To give an often deceptively attractive or improved appearance to. 3. Aladdin, complete, as Wright put it, "with his wonderful lamp, the symbol of human imagination." (Wright imagined himself as a kind of Aladdin.) There was even to be a parking garage in the shape of a Sumerian ziggurat ziggurat (zĭg`  răt), form of temple common to the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians. The earliest examples date from the end of the 3d millenium B.C. . The debatable eclecticism eclecticism, in art eclecticism (ĭklĕk`tĭsĭz'əm), art style in which features are borrowed from various styles. was intended to honor Iraq's past while saving its future from the West's boxy box·y adj. box·i·er, box·i·est Resembling a box, especially in simplicity or rectangularity. box  i·ness n. International Style. Wright wanted "to demonstrate that we [the West] are not destructive, but constructive" where Iraq is concerned. A recurring Western wish, it seems. If the Iraq is like any of his old plans, perhaps Wright will yet have his granted. |
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