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

He concluded, "To build an already dated New York monstrosity to stand up to present Arizona to posterity seems to me a crime." (14)

Wright led a vigorous campaign to gain public support for his project through June 1957, and the spirited debate that ensued gained statewide and national attention. His five-month-long effort continued past his ninetieth birthday in June, after his journey to Iraq in May. Clark, who had published several articles about Wright's plans in February and March, arranged a press conference on April 5. In Clark's press release, Wright was quoted as saying that "the state and its people are entitled to a capitol building consistent with the terrain and climate and nature of the Southwest--not a building that can be found in any duplicated skyscraper style of a hundred cities." (15) Through the spring, Wright mounted a campaign to gain the signatures of twenty-five thousand voters, required by state law to have the issue decided by popular vote. (16) By June, however, his plan was rejected by legislators who claimed it was "too ornate and would be too expensive." (17) The proposal was also legally questionable, because Arizona's constitution required that the state capitol be located in the city of Phoenix. Nonetheless, in his state capitol design, Wright presented a vision of modern civic monumentality in the desert that was structurally innovative and regionally expressive. The affinity between the proposed capitol and its landscape was consistent with his own architecture nearby at Taliesin West and his earlier unbuilt project for a resort hotel near Phoenix, San Marcos-in-the-Desert of 1928-29. (18) At the same time, the state capitol as Wright envisioned it included explicit symbolic references to Native American and also to later Arizona history. In short, his regional ideal for a modern public architecture included elements of both nature and culture. Wright would soon explore similar themes for a new public architecture in Baghdad, with its very different history and politics.

Wright's Opera House for Hashimite Baghdad

Wright's project for the Arizona State Capitol coincided with his appointment as architect of the Baghdad Opera House. In a letter of January 24, 1957, he accepted the commission from Dr. Dhia Jafar, Iraq's minister of development and head of the Iraqi Development Board. On February 26, the board approved the appointment of Wright "as consultant on designs and specifications for the Baghdad Opera House," which was initially to be centrally located. (19) When Wright arrived in the Iraqi capital on May 19, he entered a city that was then at the center of debate about Iraqi attitudes toward the modern world and the area's multiple pasts. (20)

Under the Hashimite kings, in power first with British support from 1921, Iraq's government had pursued a dual ideological course through the post-World War II era. Iraq presented itself as a center of Arab independence, first from the Ottoman Turks, who had ruled the region until World War I, and then from the British, who granted Iraq full sovereignty in 1932. As a constitutional monarchy, the Iraqi crown championed a national identity as a modern ideal to override ethnic rivalries within the new state's borders. Yet historically, Iraq identified its golden age as the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258 CE), when the country was the domain of the caliph, or the head of Islam succeeding the Prophet Muhammad (570-632). Descendants of the Prophet's uncle Abbas brought the caliphate to Iraq, and the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur, moved the capital to Baghdad, which he began to build in 762. Under his son, Harun al-Rashid (786-809), Baghdad flourished as a commercial and intellectual center, whose best-known literature was The Thousand and One Nights, dating partly from the ninth century, many of its stories set at Harun al-Rashid's court. Hashimite kings sought to equal this period's greatness. As the head of the newly forming Baghdad University said, "It will return the golden era of Baghdad during the Abbasid reign." (21)