The Chadirji family has played a monumental role in Iraq’s contemporary history, making significant contributions to the world of politics, architecture, philosophy, literature and photography. One of the most famous members of the family is Kamil Chadirji (1897-1968) a lawyer, photojournalist and political statesman who founded the secular National Democratic Party (NDP) in Iraq. While Kamil’s lasting legacy is the NDP, which is carried on by his son Naseer Chadirji, he also left a vast photographic legacy documenting scenes of 1920s to 1940s Iraq. Much of this photography focuses on the architecture of the time and thus it should not come as a surprise that his son, Rifat Chadirji, became an internationally renowned architect and architectural theorist.
Rifat Chadirji was trained in Britain and returned to Iraq in 1952 where he formed the architectural practice Iraq Consult. The central idea of the practice was to create a style of architecture that fused modernist architectural styles, such as the Bauhaus, with the Iraqi and regional vernacular. Architectural theory, as well as the actual practice of architecture, makes up a substantial part of Rifat Chadirji’s body of work.
“Architecture is not just one entity it has three functions: firstly it must be utilitarian, secondly it must be symbolic and finally it must achieve pleasure and happiness,” Chadirji said.
Symbolism dominates much of Chadirji’s work. “Symbolism is important because it is how we satisfy our human need for identity,” Chadirji stated. For Chadirji this meant the search for a visual language that fused the ideas of the traditional with the key concepts of Twentieth Century architecture. “The basic philosophy was that I wanted modern architecture to be regionalised,” Chadirji explained. Regionalising modernity would become a lifetime obsession for Rifat Chadirji and, one could argue, for his family as a whole.
Rifat Chadirji’s work on fusing Twentieth Century architecture with the traditional would produce startling buildings in the heart of Baghdad. As soon as Rifat returned to Iraq in 1952 he began to change the built environment of the country almost immediately. In 1953 Rifat was to build his first block of flats, combining the ideas of Le Corbusier and modern aesthetics with local features. However, the 1960s was Rifat’s golden period of construction and design. During this period, three buildings - the Iraq Consult offices (1965), the building for the Iraqi Federation of Industries (1966), and offices for the Central Post, Telegraph and Telephone Administration (1971), all in Baghdad - would define Chadirji’s built work.
The Central Post, Telegraph and Telephone Administration building articulated the new vocabulary of architectural style that Chadirji had developed. The modernist influence is immediately recognisable while simultaneously the ‘Iraqiness’ of the building also shines through. The distinctive arches and the focus on geometry achieved the regional modernism that Chardirji sought. The Villa Hamada also shows Chadirji’s unique vision of modern architecture that draws on regional influences.
Unfortunately, Iraq would not see any more Chadirji designs after this golden period in the 1960s as he was arrested in October of 1978, while he was eating his breakfast. Chadirji explained to the New York Times in an interview just before the United States occupied Iraq in 2003 just how his arrest came about.
“My firm had offices all over the Gulf States, and Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who was the president before Saddam, wanted to use them for intelligence. I said I would not do it…I had a trial that lasted one-minute-and-a-half, and I was sentenced to life in prison. Bakr wanted to execute me, but I was saved by Saddam’s brother, who knew I was innocent,” Chadirji explained.
Rifat Chardiji would languish in prison for 20 months; 152 days of the prison sentence would be in a cell two meters long and 1.7 meters wide without light and proper food. He was then transferred to the now infamous Abu Ghraib Prison.
Chadirji has released a book entitled A Wall Between Two Darknesses which he co-authored with his wife Balqis Sharara that gives an intimate portrait of his time in prison. Chadirji describes the “inner world” of the prisons while Sharara sheds light upon the “outer world” and how she was also imprisoned as an outcast in Iraqi society.
Chadirji would be released just as rapidly as he was detained. In 1979 Saddam Hussein came to power and he wanted Baghdad to be prepared for the planned conference of the nonaligned countries in 1982. Thus, in 1980 Chadirji was driven, still in his prison clothes, to the President and was given the choice of either remaining in prison or preparing Baghdad, with unlimited resources, for the nonaligned conferences. The very next day Chadirji set to work.
In other circumstances it would be a dream project for an architect. However, Chadirji did not wallow in his bizarre and tragic situation and began cleaning the streets of Baghdad, renovating historic parts of the city, building theaters and inviting famous modernist architects such as, Robert Venturi from the United States to consult. The Iran-Iraq war would interrupt this utopian dream of Saddam’s and the more real work of Chadirji; the nonaligned conference was never held.
It was in 1982 that Chadirji finally left Iraq for London with his wife, never to return to Iraq again. Soon afterwards however he moved again, this time to the United States where he ended up teaching at Harvard in the philosophy department working on his architectural theories and stopping his work as a practicing architect.
“We are the only animal that can produce good and bad architecture that is why we need architectural theory, especially today because architecture at the moment is all about the teaching of graphics,” Chardirji explained.
From the 1980s Chadirji produced a large amount of work on architectural theory. His most famous works from this period include al-Ukhaidar and the Crystal Palace and A Dialogue on the Structure of Art and Architecture.
To encourage a new wave of modernist architecture in the region Chadirji launched the Chadirji Award for architects in Lebanon. He launched this award primarily because he felt something wrong was going wrong in the built environment of Lebanon.
“We have thousands of university graduates today but everything getting built is very ugly. Why is this? So the award, that consists of a committee of five academics, asks students to submit their schemes that focus on how we should think about architecture in the future and what the role of architecture is, or should be, in our societies.”
Most of all Chadirji wishes to establish an architecture that “promotes healthy social relations and which encourages an affinity between the individual architect and the public.”
The monumental size of that task in the regional context of today was illustrated to Chadirji when he was asked to design a new flag for Iraq to replace the current one designed by Saddam. The final submission that he chose to submit to the public was a white banner with a blue crescent that had three stripes at the bottom. “Of the three stripes the two outer stripes were blue to represent the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the yellow stripe in the middle was supposed to represent the Kurds,” Chadirji said. This flag however, was attacked straight away for appearing to be too similar to the Israeli flag.
Sadly, the relationship between Chadirji and his homeland has never been repaired and as a result one of the most significant thinkers on how to reconcile modernity with Iraq, and the region at large, has continued to remain in exile. True to his spirit Chadirji now splits his time between the West and the Middle East spending the summer in Britain and the winter in Lebanon. Nevertheless, Chadirji has created a body of work that outlines the possibility of a more hopeful and constructive relationship between the two regions, one that offers insights for the next generation of free thinkers.
