May 16, 2016
Le Corbusier in Baghdad
An architectural historian at Georgetown University, Dr Mina Marefat explores the history of Le Corbusier’s Gymnasium
Baghdad in 1957 was the scene of a unique confluence. Looking to represent the new nation of Iraq as a sophisticated, modernising member of the world community, the Iraqi Development Board invited five of the world’s most famous architects to design and build signature projects in the capital city. The United States’ Frank Lloyd Wright and giants
of International Style, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius of Bauhaus fame, as well as Italy’s Giò Ponti and Finland’s Alvar Aalto were all invited to Baghdad.
Lasting a mere 18 months, before a coup d’etat and political upheaval changed the trajectories of power in Iraq, this moment was one of converging historical currents. First, it remains as an early testament to the internationalisation of modern architecture when major pioneers of architectural modernism conveyed their vision and established their practices worldwide. Second, and intimately connected with the first, Baghdad served as a stage where the tensions between architectural universalism and particularism after World War II were enacted. Third, Baghdad is one of many cities where, from the 1930s to the 1960s, state-sponsored building redefined urban significations and symbolism.
The Iraqi Development Board was created in 1950. Its projects included irrigation, flood control, swamp drainage, affordable housing, land reclamation, agriculture, grants of state land to small farmers, and a modern transportation and communication system to knit the country together.
Development Board members came from Iraq’s elite who had longstanding connections to landowning and commercial enterprises as well as to the monarchy. Most of them were educated abroad, largely in the US and the UK. A young generation of western-educated architects, the children of these same leaders, would in turn influence and reshape the attitudes of the board, particularly in the second phase, which included plans for rebuilding Baghdad. A number of these young architects convinced the board that they should break with the standard practice of engaging British architects whose work, as one young architect, Rifat Chadirji later put it, was ‘conventional and not modern’.
Given the Development Board’s composition and its proclivity to favour what the young architects approved of as ‘modern architecture’, there was no one in the world more identified with that phrase than Le Corbusier. Swiss-born and self-taught, he was a star known by one name. ‘My plans are the very visage of today,’ he wrote. His tenets became the commandments of modern architecture and his phrases became slogans associated with the movement he helped generate, like ‘The house is a machine for living’ and ‘Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light.’
In 1955, when he was invited to design for Baghdad, Le Corbusier was at the height of his career. In addition to commissions throughout Europe, he was building across the globe, from South America to India. The design of the city of Chandigarh, the capital of Punjab, presented to him in 1950, catapulted him into the international limelight.
By then, he had long been the dominant presence in the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CAIM), which he founded with Walter Gropius.
Invited to design an Olympic stadium in 1955, Le Corbusier did not travel to see the Baghdad site until November 1957. The program for the sports venue was hand-delivered to him in Baghdad, as a letter signed by Iraq’s Minister of Development. It listed the buildings required by the Ministry of Education, Physical Department: a 50,000-seat stadium, an Olympic swimming pool and a separate gymnasium with seating for 3,000.
With the help of Iannis Xenakis, his longtime assistant and collaborator on the Philips Pavilion for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, Le Corbusier developed the design of the sports complex. On June 6th, 1958, he delivered to the Development Board the drawings of a stadium for 50,000 spectators, a gymnasium for 3,500 spectators, a swimming pool for 5,000 spectators, a traffic circulation plan for pedestrians and motorcars, and a landscaping site plan for parks and gardens.
‘I can affirm here that I have given an immense attention to the problem and I think that I can affirm as already said in the beginning of this note, that this is not a rough draft of the project but the project itself… It is not a fancy, it is a birth.’
Fondation Le Corbusier, P4 (1) 198. Specifications signed by Le Corbusier. May 31st, 1958
An intriguing part of Le Corbusier’s accompanying notes is the level of technical virtuosity in his proposed Baghdad design. As his modernist signature in the Middle East, Le Corbusier self-consciously distinguished himself from the styles of modernist rivals such as Gropius, Aalto and Ponti.
On the larger question of where Baghdad fits into Le Corbusier’s modernist oeuvre, technological innovation was integral to the design of his City of Sport. His innovative use of moving waves for the swimming pool, ‘piscine à vague’ reflected his personal enthusiasm for the sport of swimming as well as his appreciation of the Tigris River as Baghdad’s most prominent feature. He also proposed what he called ‘electronic games, a moving element enabling the projection of the scene over the football field,’ thus presaging by decades the now standard digital screen broadcasts in sports arenas.
On July 14th, 1958, just one day after the project was formally approved, the Iraqi government was overthrown. Fortunately for Le Corbusier, his sports complex, like the university of Walter Gropius and Gio Ponti’s Development Board headquarters, survived the following years of political upheaval. In 1959, Le Corbusier’s office went through a radical transformation; he fired three of his long time assistants, all of whom had worked on the Baghdad project, including Xenakis. He instead delegated the production of his technical drawings to George-Marc Présenté, an engineer and businessman with an international practice.
In May 1959, Le Corbusier travelled a second time to Baghdad, determined to resolve the site change, despite his dismay at losing the central urban location. His philosophy for sports centres was to place them at the heart of the city. Until his death in 1965, Le Corbusier was continually responding to turbulent news about his Baghdad project, including three more site changes and slow-paying clients with no fewer than 1,500 drawings, many of them signed by himself.
“I have realised for the Baghdad Stadium an architecture recognised as having an exceptional quality. I have completed all the work which an architect owes to his client and it has been perfectly made. Moreover my name is attached to the quality of this work and it is also attached to its artistic and moral value. I am sure the Iraq authority will appreciate this double thing: my work and my name.”
Fondation Le Corbusier, P4 (3) 340 letter from Le Corbusier to the Director of Major Projects, Baghdad. May 10th, 1963
Le Corbusier’s Baghdad Stadium and City of Sport was shelved when the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, which agreed to pay for the building, proposed a different architect and the Iraqi authorities accepted. Years after his death, with the efforts of his Iraqi devotees, Rifat Chadirji helped revive a piece of the sports city and, with little modification to the final plans of Le Corbusier, Présenté and his team were employed in 1973 to construct the gymnasium.
Le Corbusier had paid special attention to the gymnasium from the very beginning when it was initially conceived as a simple rectangular building, his ‘boîte à miracles’, a magical light box with a translucent roof. The only covered and air-conditioned building in the sports complex, it was also the most expensive. As he sought to meet his client’s demands to reduce costs, Le Corbusier proposed a giant sliding steel door that would open an entire side of the building toward an outdoor amphitheatre thereby increasing the seating capacity. Used only in aircraft hangars, his oversized, overhead sliding steel wall was a technological advancement, underlining Le Corbusier’s innovative spirit. The sloped curve of the roof suspended by cables paralleled the stadium seating or tribune. The simple box evolved into a much more complex building with three-sided tribune seating for 4,800 spectators and the once straight staircase was replaced by a sweeping curved ramp. It provided a grand entrance that framed the view and enhanced the experience of an ‘architectural promenade.’ The signature ramp was a design element he was perfecting with another building of the same time period, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. Sketches and records of his meetings with engineers reveal that the roof’s sloping form was inspired by Bedouin tents of the Arabian Peninsula. In the final design, the roof retained its shape but the translucent ceiling was replaced by a more conventional steel truss roof with a band of clerestory windows.
All the auxiliary facilities of the Baghdad Gymnasium, such as the changing rooms and bathrooms, were housed in a kidney-shaped concrete structure on top of which Le Corbusier proposed a roof garden. Surrounded by gardens, the gymnasium is close to the stadium and readily accessible to all of the outdoor amphitheatres, offering a magnificent view of the sports city, the Tigris River and the city of Baghdad.
While a team of assistants helped him on the project, including Alain Tavès, Robert Rebutato, José Oubrerie and Guillermo Jullian de la Fuente, as well as members of the Présenté team who contributed to the project, Le Corbusier’s personal involvement at every stage of the design was never in question. He insisted on reviewing every drawing including the mechanical and electrical plans. Throughout the construction process the supervisor of the project was French architect Axel Mesney.
Located next to the Gulbenkian stadium, the gymnasium was finally completed in 1980. The walls carried sculptural reliefs of Le Corbusier’s famous signature image, the ‘measure of man’ known as the Modulor, above which were words from Corbusier himself: ‘Order is the key to life.’
