Every Building in Baghdad: The Rifat
Chadirji Archives at the Arab Image
Figure 1 Installation view of Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design, Jewish Museum,
New York, 4 November 2016–26 March 2017 (photo by Will Ragozzino/SocialShutterbug.com;
exhibition design by Diller Scofidio + Renfro).
Related Publication
Esther da Costa Meyer, Pierre Chareau: Modern
Architecture and Design (New York: Jewish
Museum/New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 2016), 288 pp., 285 color illus. $60, ISBN
9780300165791
Notes
1. Esther da Costa Meyer, Pierre Chareau: Modern
Architecture and Design (New York: Jewish
Museum/New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 2016), 11.
2. Marc Vellay and Kenneth Frampton, Pierre
Chareau: Architect and Craftsman, 1883–1950
(New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 61.
3. Pierre Chareau, cited in Brian Brace Taylor and
Bernard Bauchet, “The Maison de Verre,” in da
Costa Meyer, Pierre Chareau, 173.
4. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections
from a Damaged Life (1951), trans. E. F. N. Jephcott
(London: Verso, 1978), 41.
Foundation
Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in
the Fine Arts, Chicago
15 September–31 December 2016
The sober yet expectant atmosphere of a
rich archive, brimming with objects that
point to numerous riveting stories, greeted
visitors to this exhibition at the Graham
Foundation. An array of documents were
displayed within austere spaces, mostly
photographs by Iraqi architect Rifat
Chadirji, curated from his extensive collec-
tion previously deposited at the Arab Image
Foundation in Beirut (now at MIT)
(Figure 1). The photographs, amassed by
Chadirji over several decades, capture his
design work from 1952 to 1978, alongside
various aspects of Iraq’s cultural life—rituals,
crafts, and spaces—as well as his social circle
and travels. The stark presentation of the
images suggested a minimum mediation
between the archive and the visitor, giving
the intricate details, enigmatic figures, and
unfamiliar landscapes a striking impact.
The selection for this exhibition—
focused primarily on architectural projects
and urban scenes—was similar to that for
the first iteration of the show at Columbia
University’s Arthur Ross Architecture
Gallery, held earlier the same year, but filled
a larger space at the Graham Foundation’s
Madlener House. The material was gener-
ously displayed in four rooms on two floors,
an impressive volume dedicated to a subject
that many visitors were encountering for
the first time. This expansive scale con-
trasted sharply with the intimacy of the
displayed archival pages, each featuring a
few small photographs.
On the ground floor, visitors circulated
around Chadirji’s photographs mounted
on freestanding skeletal structures, while
his larger limited-edition etchings of proj-
ects, printed in 1984, were wall mounted.
On the second level, Chadirji’s photo-
graphs were carried away from the walls
by similarly delicate armatures. A selec-
tion of fellow Iraqi photographer Latif
Al-Ani’s photographs, also held by the
Arab Image Foundation, were shown on
the upper level, but mounted directly on
walls.
EXHIBITIONS 407
Figure 1 Installation view of Every Building in Baghdad: The Rifat Chadirji Archives at the Arab Image Foundation, Graham Foundation for Advanced
Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, 2016 (photo by RCH | EKH).
While the majority of the photographs
featured buildings and vistas in Baghdad
and other locations in Iraq, a series of im-
ages capturing the demolition of various
Baghdadi neighborhoods were empha-
sized. Chadirji recorded the destruction,
particularly in the early 1980s, that gave
way to new developments like the vast pub-
lic housing complex on Haifa Street. And
although the curators tactfully eschewed
weaving a narrative out of the material,
preferring instead to offer a candid en-
counter with the archive, visitors soon dis-
covered that this destruction was the tacit
overarching theme. Indeed, the exhibition’s
text emphatically foregrounded the notion
of precariousness. The architect, the text
postulated, was presumably aware of Iraq’s
political and cultural instability, and antici-
pated greater catastrophes to come. His
photographs were meant as documents
that could survive Iraq’s volatility, thus
becoming grim signifiers of both past
instability and the ongoing devastation in
408 JSAH | 76.3 | SEPTEMBER 2017
Iraq and the region. This implied vulnera-
bility was carried through to the exhibition
design, as the skeletal armatures conjured
the fragility of this precious archive and the
elusive reality it supposedly denoted.
Between the astute exhibition design
and the underlined turmoil, however, a
critical dimension was inadvertently ob-
scured: the emphasis on calamities and pre-
cariousness overlooked the vibrant culture
that perseveres in Iraq and its diaspora.
Furthermore, the blunt presentation of ar-
chival material communicated more than
the exhibition had intended. The architect,
the body of work depicted, and the city’s
built environment—like most aspects of
Iraq’s cultural and spatial history in the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century—remain
woefully under studied. Chadirji did his
part decades ago, with his intuitive docu-
mentary sensibility, providing raw material
for future histories of his time. This lent
the exhibition its expectant quality, as
though the material beckoned viewers to
fulfill its creator’s original desires. To con-
front these images was to recognize the
multiple histories yet to be written, or al-
ready lost. Therefore, the perceived vul-
nerability was a brilliant observation, but
perhaps a misplaced one.
The visitor was left confounded by the
encounter with this enigmatic material.
Chadirji’s photographs are certainly in-
valuable objects, but even relics are usu-
ally presented in a manner that conveys
a narrative about how they relate to each
other, or how they are enmeshed in
narratives familiar to the viewer—stories
that make those artifacts comprehensible
and relatable. The images displayed,
however, inadvertently became floating
signifiers, referring to a past but not to
a history. Moreover, the images, which
were meant to convey destruction, actu-
ally connoted a historical vacuum. Rather
than suggestive objects through which a
visitor could connect to stories that hu-
manized the context, they represented
debris, to use Walter Benjamin’s haunting
allegory from his theses on the philosophy
of history—pieces of wreckage waiting to
be salvaged and deciphered. Perhaps the
exhibition unconsciously meant to com-
municate this tragedy, to place the visitor in
the position of the angel of history contem-
plating a lamentable pile from the past.
The dots were yet to be connected, and a
plot was far from being discerned. The
most outrageous violence to which the ex-
hibition pointed was, therefore, not the
physical loss that befell Baghdad and its
built form but an ongoing injustice in-
flicted on this context—namely, the fact
that thinkers and scholars have not fully
engaged with the great cultures that un-
folded during the region’s recent past.
By evoking this missing dimension, these
lost histories and their significance to archi-
tectural culture and to contemporaneous
developments, the exhibition represented a
big leap forward. In an increasingly di-
vided world, the inclusive gesture of a
large exhibition about an Iraqi architect
was an act of intrepid speculation and
reassessment—a poignant invitation to
examine figures and places that made vital
contributions to post–World War II ar-
chitecture. The Graham Foundation cel-
ebrated its sixtieth anniversary in 2016 by
honoring its mission of fostering diverse
architectural ideas and cultures. With
such projects, underrepresented aspects
of global and cross-cultural exchanges are
finally receiving the attention they de-
serve, which should in turn lead to further
interest and rigorous scholarship. While
this is late in comparison to the extensive
existing knowledge on European and
American histories, it is undoubtedly a
step in the right direction.
AMIN ALSADEN
Harvard University
The Form of Form: Lisbon
Architecture Triennale
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; Museum of
Art, Architecture, and Technology; and Centro
Cultural de Belém, Lisbon
5 October–11 December 2016
The fourth Lisbon Architecture Triennale,
titled The Form of Form, consisted of three
primary exhibitions and seven smaller satel-
lite events and exhibitions located through-
out the city that explored the concept of
form. Curators André Tavares and Diogo
Seixas Lopes skillfully illustrated that form
is a complex concept that encourages im-
portant discussions about authorship, repre-
sentation, and the political, social, and
economic aspects of architectural design.
The most captivating exhibition of
the Triennale was Building Site, which ad-
dressed the relationship between buildings
and process. The exhibition, curated by
André Tavares and held at the Calouste
Gulbenkian Foundation, comprised seven
sections, each concentrating on a different
architect and theme: “Happiness,” illus-
trated by Cedric Price’s McAppy Report
(1973–75); “Lightness,” focusing on the
promotion of self-help building sites by
the architectural collective Usina; “Sys-
tem,” featuring François Hennebique’s re-
inforced concrete building system (1890–
1914); “Time,” highlighting OMA’s Casa
da Musica; “Material,” illustrated by
SKREI’s surveys of raw materials in Portu-
gal; “Communication,” showing David
Chipperfield Architects’ Neues Museum;
and “Choreographies,” presenting Pedro
Ignacio Alonso and Hugo Palmorola’s se-
lections of excerpts from Soviet cartoons
and films (1921–80).
Most engaging of the contemporary
material in this exhibition was SKREI’s in-
stallation. The group created a catalogue of
Portuguese soils, beautifully displayed as if
pigments in jars, along with early materials
tests, bricks, and models. A full-scale brick
vault over centering completed a beautiful
and poetic display depicting how form is
made from local raw materials. This, to-
gether with Usina’s development of self-
help housing, offers paths toward a more
socially sensitive and politically engaged
architecture.
The sections focusing on historical ma-
terial, however, were where this exhibition
truly shone. In his McAppy Report, Cedric
Price examined building sites and labor
conditions in mid-1970s Britain and of-
fered ways to improve them. The “System”
section illustrated François Hennebique’s
ingenuity in developing a system for rein-
forced concrete construction and his business
acumen in disseminating this knowledge
to agents to put it to use (Figure 1). Models
reconstructing the casting process com-
plemented beautiful technical drawings,
such as for the Grand Palais in Paris.
Alonso and Palmorola’s selections in the
“Choreographies” section demonstrated
how building sites and building systems
(steel girders versus panel construction)
gained meaning in national imaginaries as
embodiments of modernization. Together,
these sections enriched an otherwise narrow
view of building sites focused on production.
They expanded the scope of inquiry and
analysis and increased the range of materials
in the exhibition to include analytical re-
ports, hand drawings, patents, and cartoons.
The inclusion of historical materials in
this exhibition was its primary strength.
However, the presence of these materials
brought into focus an overall weakness in
the Triennale, as Building Site was the only
exhibition to address history explicitly. In
eschewing the historical in favor of the
contemporary, the Triennale neglected a
wealth of information that could have
broadened the scope of the event and en-
abled it to probe contemporary practices
more deeply.
This shortcoming is exemplified in the
exhibition curated by Lopes, also called
The Form of Form, which questioned con-
temporary notions of authorship. Lopes
invited Johnston Marklee, Nuno Brandão
Costa, and OFFICE Kersten Geers David
Van Severen to design a pavilion on the
Pátio do Carvão outside the Museum of
Art, Architecture, and Technology. The pa-
vilion was constructed from a total of
twelve individual parts, with the architects
choosing spaces from their own built work
and from the work of the other participants;
the parts were sited abutting one another.
The method of selection and placement
purposely disrupted viewers’ ability to read-
ily identify the authors of the various sec-
tions and also introduced the potential of
multiple authors for any given portion.
Reproductions of images collected by
Socks Studio, all reduced to fit on A4 paper
and displayed at the same height, were
pasted on walls throughout the pavilion.
The reproductions did, in fact, contain
some historical materials, including a draw-
ing of the plan of the neolithic Anatolian
settlement of Çatalhöyük. At first sight, the
plan might have seemed to illustrate the cu-
rator’s theme, but this was not the case given
its history. This is a work of architecture not
attributed to any authors—indeed, it was
the only work in the exhibition not
credited—and built by accretion over hun-
dreds if not thousands of years. This is quite
EXHIBITIONS 409