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

63. "Perhaps Persian architecture was origin and end of a quality of the spirit--a feeling for the abstract as form in architecture gradually lost--and never to be surpassed unless the ideal of architecture as organic now reaches logical but passionate expression in the years to come"; Frank Lloyd Wright and Iovanna Lloyd Wright, Architecture: Man in Possession of His Earth, ed. Patricia Coyle Nicholson (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), 60, quoted in Marefat, "Wright's Baghdad," 192, who develops this link to Persian sources. Iraqis saw their Islamic architectural past as partly Persian as well as Arab. One contemporary commented that "Baghdad as a whole was immensely influenced with the Persian architectural style. The arches were Persian, and the domes were Persian"; Memdouh Zeki, "Baghdad Expanded Quickly in First Two Centuries," IT, August 31, 1957, 17.

In 1955 Nuri al-Said had requested American radio transmission equipment specifically to match the broadcasting power of Radio Cairo, then engaged in a propaganda campaign against him and Hashimite rule. See Gallman, Iraq under Nuri, 49-50; and Birdwood, Nuri al-Said, 237-53. Dr. Jamali also protested the Egyptian station, "The Voice of Free Iraq," and Damascus Radio and Press. "Protest against 'Voice of Free Iraq,'" IT, May 10 1958, 3. The "Sword of Mohammet" may also relate to the 100-plus-foot-high steel columns that then became landmarks in the Iraq Petroleum Company's fields, such as the one set up in Kirkuk early in 1957. "A Baghdad Diary," IT, February 4, 1957, 8. The spire recurred in Wright's other projects, notably in his unbuilt "Mile-High Illinois" skyscraper presented in October 1956. On this design, see recently Brigitte Raschke, Frank Lloyd Wright--the Mile High Illinois: Utopie oder Architekturkritik (Munchen: Scaneg, 1996).

64. Wright and Wright, Man in Possession of His Earth, 77, quoted in Levine, Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, 498 n. 111.

65. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Future of Architecture (New York: Horizon Press, 1953), 49, quoted in Marefat, "Wright's Baghdad," 191.

66. "Frank Lloyd Wright Looks to the Future in His 88th Year," Santa Barbara News-Press, January 27, 1957, A-1. The first quote is from "Wright Going to Iraq to Design Opera House," New York Times, January 27, 1957, 57. See also "Opera and Poetry," Architectural Forum 106 (March 1957): 97.

67. Wright, "Designs for Baghdad," 95.