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

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  Of course art, architecture, and religion, are yet the soul of any
  true civilization. They are the elements which will determine how long
  a civilization is going to live.... I think that if you are to succeed
  in developing here a life of your own it would be from the interior
  inspiration of your own great spirit in antiquity.

He added,

  It is still your period, I mean it is your inheritance. Each great
  civilization has contributed something of its own to the life of the
  world. Now in the push of modernism, modernization, that ancient
  strength should not be weakened and lost and that back-ground of your
  own culture should now be developed so genuinely, so broadly and so
  individually that it still has so many phases of beauty that no
  architect should come here and put a cliche to work. (34)

Wright had expressed the same position when working in Japan from 1913 to 1923, advocating that modern architects working there acknowledge and adapt that country's premodern cultural traditions. In accepting the Baghdad commission, he wrote to Dr. Jafar, "I cannot tell you how pleased I am to serve my feeling for the Orient again--as once before for Japan in the building of the earthquake-proof Imperial Hotel in Tokio." (35) On arriving in Baghdad, Wright made it known that he was "not limiting himself to the design of an opera house only but a sort of cultural centre suited to Baghdad's historical and cultural background as well as its character." He visited "different parts of the city, the museum [of Iraqi antiquities], the Abbasid Palace, the site where Baghdad University will be built and other places to see which site is most suitable for the project." He "has had several talks on the project with the executive members of the Development Board, top-ranking engineers and others," including the board's head, Dr. Jafar. (36) In Arizona Wright had argued that landscape should provide the keynote for new public architecture. In Iraq, as for Japan, he proposed an architecture that was technically and functionally modern but that was not alien to place, understood as both natural and human history. Hence, his tour of the city would logically have focused on a suitable site for his work.

Wright recounted his discovery of that site in a talk he gave to his apprentices, the Taliesin Fellows, on his return:

  Flying over [Baghdad] I saw an island, unoccupied, practically in the
  heart of the city [Fig. 6: c]. And it was about two miles long and
  about a mile wide, maybe not so wide, three-quarters of a mile. And I
  wondered, well, when I came down and looked at the map there was that
  island with nothing on it whatever. And in figuring out where to build
  an opera house and develop the cultural center. I saw they had
  allocated the university on the ground opposite the island. And the
  island was a cleavage right between the city and the university. So I
  went after that island.