From Le Corbusier’s sketches for a monumental

ziggurat-museum in Geneva (Mundaneum, 1929)

to urban development plans for cities like New York
in the 1920s, Mesopotamian forms have had a
profound impact on modern visual and architectural
culture in the West.

As part of the Sumer and the Modern Paradigm

exhibition, the archaeologist and researcher Maria
Gabriella Micale explores how twentieth-century
architecture was in⁦uenced by the drawings of the
pioneers of archaeology, reinterpreting and
recasting the architecture of the ancient Near East
in the design of modern buildings.

30_11_2017
Maria Gabriella Micale

Le Corbusier. Mundaneum, World Museum, Geneva, 1929.

Pencil, ink, coloured pencil © Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris
The Fate of Mesopotamian
Architecture in the Spiral of Image
Reproduction
In the region corresponding to modern Iraq, at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, the archaeological
exploration of the ancient Near East began. Before these
missions conducted by the pioneers of Near
Eastern archaeology on behalf of European
museums, no signi⁥cant architectural remains from
ancient Assyria and Babylonia were known. In fact, their
history was only partially known and that knowledge came
via biblical and classical textual sources (i.e. Herodotus),
whose famous descriptions often served as the foundation
for the fantastic images of famous Mesopotamian
lost cities created by European artists well before
their actual discovery (Fig. 1). Thus, in theory, the
material discovery of ancient Mesopotamia should have
bridged the gap between imagination and reality, at least
concerning these artists’ architectural culture. However, a
closer examination of the question reveals that this logical
expectation has not been ful⁥lled, and that the image of
ancient Near Eastern architecture was not reconstructed
on the basis of archaeological research even in some
allegedly scienti⁥c publications.
Fig. 1. Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The Sumer and the Modern Paradigm exhibition opens a

discussion about concepts such as artistic
reception and cultural memory. However, the
power of architectural images to embody di erent
cultural meanings through similar formal features is
often underestimated. In the light of this, it is important to
emphasize that the connection between
Mesopotamian architecture and modernity was
mediated by the drawings presented in the rst
publications of Assyrian discoveries (Fig. 2). These
architectural (re-)constructions, designed as an integral
part of the archaeological publications, had an impact not
only on the history of the scienti⁥c interpretation of
ancient architecture, but also on the construction of
modern architectural designs and occasionally on the
reconstruction of real or alleged traditions (Fig. 3).
However, the importance of these drawings
reconstructing ancient Mesopotamian
architecture lies also in the fact that they clearly
functioned as vehicles for ancient architecture to enter
into modern design, thus creating a powerful spiral of
images traveling through time.
Fig. 2. Victor Place – Félix Thomas, Palais. Ensemble de la
porte ff. du harem, Ninive et l’Assyrie, 1867-1870. Source:
General Research Division, The New York Public Library Digital
Collections.

Fig 3. Chaldean Church, Aleppo, Syria, 2007. Photo: Maria

Gabriella Micale.
Le Corbusier’s sketches for the Mundaneum in
Geneva (1929) exhibited in Sumer and the Modern
Paradigm are a typical example of the use of
Mesopotamian forms in modern Western visual
and architectural culture. A number of more or less
contemporary (and more or less famous) projects show
how widespread the Mesopotamian temple-tower/ziggurat
forms were in modern building design, regardless of the
artistic movement to which their authors belonged (Fig.
4). It is di⁤icult to detect the assumption of the single
choices of these formal volumetric expressions. Hugh
Ferriss writes about the American urban planning
regulations in those years: ‘The building rises
vertically on its lot lines only so far as is allowed by law
fi…]. Above this it slopes inward at speci⁥ed angles fi…]. A
tower rises, as is permitted, to unlimited height, being in
area not over the fourth the area of the property fi…]. The
mass thus delineated is not an architect’s design: it is
simply a form which results from legal speci⁥cations.’ And
further: ‘The ancient Assyrian ziggurat is an
excellent embodiment of the modern New York
legal restriction: may we not for a moment
imagine an array of modern ziggurats, providing
restaurants and theatres on their ascending
levels?’ (from The Metropolis of Tomorrow, 1929: pp.
74, 99). An explicit correspondence between the ancient
religious function of a ziggurat and modern monumental
buildings evoking an ancient tower is not apparent (the
project for a Soldiers’ Memorial Church by Boehm,
Goettingen, 1923 fiFig. 5] is an exception in the context
of a religious architecture dominated by classical models).
On the other hand, a clear reference to Mesopotamian
culture can be seen in some monumental projects from
modern Turkey dated between the 1930s and 40s that
could be interpreted as an endorsement of  modernism
(Fig. 6). Even though no Mesopotamian tradition could be
claimed, the reference to the ziggurat may have been
connected to the idea of a racial/linguistic relationship
between Turks and ancient Sumerians supported by some
intellectuals in the 1920s. In these examples,
architecture enters the public space and creates
visual links that aim at public recognition of
formal features and meanings from Mesopotamia
– whether these links are based on substantial cultural
ties or not.

Fig. 4. Sigismund Vladislavovich Dombrovski, Meeting Place of

the Peoples, 1919. Courtesy: Wolfgang Pehnt.
Fig. 5. Dominikus Böhm, Soldiers’ Memorial Church,
Goettingen, 1923. Courtesy: Wolfgang Pehnt.
Fig. 6. Bruno Taut, the 1938 Izmir International Fair. The
Ministry of Education’s “Culture Pavilion”. Source: Arkitekt
1939/9-10: 202.

Was the fragmentary materiality of

Mesopotamian architecture brought to light by
archaeology the source of the tower-shaped
projects in both Europe and Turkey? Or were
perhaps the archaeological drawings published in the
scienti⁥c literature to explain and support the di⁤erent
hypotheses of reconstruction, the inspiration for these
buildings? In either case, the image is perceived and used
as if it were the reality, while the architectural forms that
this image conveys have the power to embody di⁤erent
meanings in di⁤erent contexts.

However, how much of modern and contemporary

architecture draws on these archaeological
drawings? And how much within these drawings actually
derives from the individual visual culture or educational
background of the archaeologists reconstructing ancient
architecture? The majority of Robert Koldewey’s drawings
seem to suggest his tacit compliance with the principles of
the Rational School, while Walter Andrae, as a student of
Cornelius Gurlitt at the University of Dresden, appears to
have been in⁦uenced by the principles of the German
Jugendstil and the compositional perspectives in vogue
with the Gothic Revival in the 1920s. Architectural
reconstructions of ancient Near Eastern architecture and
urban contexts were heavily in⁦uenced by projects that
were supposedly well known at the time when those
reconstructions were made. Examples include the
perspective reconstruction of the Citadel of
Khorsabad (c. 1938), which recalls both the National
Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington, D.C., conceived
by the McMillan Commission (1901), and the Plan for
a City of Three Million People by Le Corbusier
(1922). A much more recent archaeological
reconstruction inspired by a modern building may also be
the perspective drawing of the Temple of Salomon by
Theodor Busink (1970) (Fig. 7), whose model may
have been the famous Larkin Administration building
designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (1906) (Fig. 8).
Interestingly, the interiors of Wright’s building (Fig. 9)
seem to have also inspired the interiors of the Synagogue
of Plauen designed by Fritz Landauer, destroyed during
the Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938) (Fig. 10) – a
parallel which, however, may only suggest that Wright’s
famous building served as a model for a wide range of
modern designs as well as modern reconstructions of
ancient buildings, albeit as a shape disconnected from
meaning and function.

Fig. 7. The Temple of Salomon according to the idea of Th.

Busink, c. 1970. Graphic editing after Busink’s reconstruction:
Maria Gabriella Micale.
Fig. 8. Frank Lloyd Wright, Larkin Administration Building,
Bu⁤alo, N.Y., 1906. Source: Wikiarquitectura.
Fig. 9. Frank Lloyd Wright, Larkin Administration Building,
interiors. Source: Wikiarquitectura.
At the end of this short overview one can say that unlike
⁥gurative art, which establishes a direct relationship
between ancient and modern artists, ancient
Mesopotamian architecture reaches the modern
world only via the mediation of the recomposition
and interpretation of its fragments by
archaeologists and architects. This mediation is,
however, bi-directional, since modern concepts of space
and volume deeply impact the archaeologist’s way of
interpreting and communicating ancient architecture. It is
this binary relationship between ancient and modern that
is the real key to understanding the creation of a
repertoire of prêt-à-porter images of ancient Near Eastern
architecture – images increasingly divorced from their
artistic, cultural and archaeological contexts – that have
the power to ‘orientalise’ architecture as needed in both
East and West.

Fig. 10. Fritz Landauer, synagogue, Plauen, interiors, 1930.

Courtesy: Architekturmuseum Schwaben.
Edited by: Deborah Bonner

archaeology architecture exhibitions

Frank Lloyd Wright / Le Corbusier / Mesopotamia /

Sumer and the Modern Paradigm