It was Saddam Hussein who liberated him the new president was on a mission to ‘rebuild Baghdad’ for a 1982 conference of Non-Aligned countries and wanted Chadirji to oversee the project. Image: Rifat Chadirji Archive, courtesy of Aga Khan Documentation Center, MIT Libraries ( the late 1970s, when Chadirji was at the peak of his career with many international offices, he was put in prison for unfounded charges under the rule of president Hassan al Bakr. One of his earliest and best-known works was his Monument to an Unknown Soldier in Fardous Square, commissioned in 1959 by Abd Al Karim Qasim in the days of the July 14 Revolution that overthrew the monarchy.Įlevation of Rafidain Bank (1971, Baghdad), from ‘The Architecture of Rifat Chadirji: A Collection of Twelve Etchings’. Since then, Chadirji’s career spanned the dizzying arcs of Iraq’s path through dictatorship, war and occupation.
While he shared their desire to incorporate Iraqi heritage into contemporary, abstract forms, he remained a modernist at heart, adapting the group’s ideas architecturally into a style he called international regionalism. His buildings – over 100 of them across Iraq, like the 1975 Baghdad Central Post Office that was damaged and looted in 2003 – bear silent witness to what was once, and what could have been.Īfter returning from his architecture studies in London, Chadirji became an early member of the Baghdad Modern art group, founded in 1951, that included sculptors Jawad Saleem and Mohammed Ghani Hikmat. He was one of the last of a generation of artists, architects and intellectuals who came of age in the country’s mid-century glory, only to see this dramatically change. His life and work were inseparable from the history of Iraq. Born into a patrician family with aristocratic, Anatolian roots, Chadirji’s grandfather was once mayor of Baghdad and his father Kamil founded the National Democratic Party in 1946. He was one of his nation’s cultural giants, embodying the strengths and the struggles of his homeland. Rifat Chadirji, the father of modern Iraqi architecture and an accomplished photographer, has passed away after contracting Covid-19.