Review: City of Mirages: Baghdad, 1952–1982; City of Mirages: Baghdad, 1952–1982; City of Mirages: Baghdad, 1952–1982; City of Mirages: Baghdad, 1952–1982; City of Mirages: Baghdad, 1952–1982; and City of Mirages: Baghdad, 1952–1982

Abstract

City of Mirages: Baghdad, 1952–1982 Collegi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya, Barcelona 10 July–13 September 2008 Casa Arabe, Madrid 9 October–9 November 2008 Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Murcia, Murcia 26 November–12 February 2009 American Institute of Architects, New York Center for Architecture 22 February–5 May 2012 Boston Society of Architects, Boston BSA Space 2 October 2012–10 January 2013 Riwaq Biennale, Ramallah Harb House 4 November–15 November 2012 After being inaugurated in Spain in 2008, the exhibition City of Mirages: Baghdad, 1952–1982 , encompassing realized and unrealized architectural and urban schemes produced for that city by foreign architects, took its turn in the United States and Palestine in 2012–13 with installations in New York, Boston, and Ramallah. Much of the cast, with fourteen projects among them, form a parade of the modern and postmodern canon: Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Jose Luis Sert, Alvar and Aino Aalto, Gio Ponti, Alison and Peter Smithson, Constantinos Doxiadis, Ricardo Bofill, and Willem Marinus Dudok. Four of the exhibition’s projects were realized in full or in part. The exhibition’s title, City of Mirages , is not the facile orientalizing heading it may at first appear. It comes rather from a poem by Iraqi Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, whose style is credited with reifying free verse and mythology in Arabic-language poetry at midcentury. Sayyab’s poetry provides a useful interlocution to an underdeveloped understanding of later orientalism, the rich yet unfulfilled possibility of the exhibition. The curatorial goal made evident in both the exhibition’s design and text, rather than explicitly deconstructing this interpretive possibility from poetry in architectural terms, is a plainer unveiling of largely unfamiliar, fascinating projects. The unrealized synergy of this collection of projects has much to do with both its time (late capitalism) and place (the decolonizing and postcolonial domain, a milieu Sayyab’s poetry actively engages). After dabbling with Marxism, Sayyab embraced a tempered form of the capitalist nationalism that characterized much of Iraq after it overthrew the Hashemite crown and became a republic in 1958. The mythology to which he was attracted was not the stuff of heroic national origin myths, as it was elsewhere in the Middle East and the postcolonial world, …