Wright's Baghdad opera house and Gammage Auditorium: in search of regional modernity

Art Bulletin, The, June, 2005 by Joseph M. Siry

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Above the Baghdad Opera House's main circular hall, Wright proposed an enormous crescent-shaped structure with its concave curvature toward the building's front. This he labeled on the plan a "crescent rainbow" (Fig. 10). As Levine noted, the crescent form, representing the waxing moon, was a key Islamic symbol. For Iraqis it specifically recalled the Fertile Crescent, and Prime Minister Nuri al-Said had proposed a future for regional Arab independence and unity known as the Fertile Crescent Plan. Wright's crescent intersecting a circular auditorium also echoes motifs found in nonobjective paintings in the Guggenheim collection, such as Kandinsky's Dominant Curve of 1936, which Rebay described as recalling a cosmic world of space (Fig. 13). (55) The modern, cosmic, and spiritual qualities that she saw in pure geometric forms closely paralleled Wright's aims for his modern architecture: to transcend the materialistic realm (which he identified with historicist architecture) and achieve a spiritual ideal evident in nature. This ideal was central to his concept of "organic architecture." As the Guggenheim's circularity contrasted with its rectilinear neighbors, so in Baghdad's hall, circularity signified transcendence of the mundane associated with the boxlike International Style buildings that Wright criticized. He wrote in 1912 that the circle signified infinity, connoting the immeasurably great or the cosmic. As Rebay called the Guggenheim Museum a temple for art, so the Baghdad Opera House was intended as a temple for culture. Like the Guggenheim and its art, the Opera House and its programs stood for ideals whose emblem was their circular geometry.

[FIGURE 12 OMITTED]

Wright's plan for the Baghdad Opera House included a circular revolving stage, an idea realized earlier in his theater for Tokyo's Imperial Hotel and developed in his Kalita Humphreys Theater in Dallas, then being designed. For Baghdad, a screen would divide the visible stage from an invisible backstage where scenes would be changed. Wright's aim, like that of several earlier modern theater architects, was to unite audience and stage, which had been the perceived effect of the Chicago Auditorium's ceiling extending out from the stage. As he said late in his career:

  The idea of a proscenium is a thing of the past--old stuff. It used to
  be that you saw a show through a hole in the wall. Audience in one
  room, performance in the other. Now all is together under one ceiling.
  The stage is divided in the center and revolves, and scenery can be
  changed in a minute without waiting. (56)

At Baghdad Wright's ideal of spatial wholeness went beyond the audience hall and stage. The longitudinal section, taken on axis to Mecca, shows the line of the future King Faisal Esplanade, continuing under the Opera House as a tunnel toward a hemispherical planetarium directly under the audience hall (Fig. 14). The tunnel would continue south of the building, opening onto the modern Garden of Eden. This section shows stairs or ramps from the "ziggurat for parking" leading up into the auditorium's entry. The main floor and balcony seating follow a downward curvature toward the stage much like that of the Chicago Auditorium (Fig. 15). The "Cross Section Facing Mecca" (Fig. 16) shows the ceiling at Baghdad tiered upward from the stage in a series of arches, also like the Chicago Auditorium (Fig. 17). As Adler and Sullivan had likened their great hall's shape to a giant megaphone, so Wright wrote of Baghdad's Opera House:

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Wright's Baghdad opera house and Gammage Auditorium: in search of regional modernity

Art Bulletin, The, June, 2005 by Joseph M. Siry

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