Brutalism in Iraq

Oil-financed Baghdad became an unlikely crossroads of international modernism in the 1950s, when the development board invited Le Corbusier, Gropius, Aalto and Wright to design for the city. Le Corbusier's sports complex, conceived in 1956, was realised posthumously as the Baghdad Gymnasium (1980), his only built work in Iraq. Iraqi architects trained abroad, led by figures such as Rifat Chadirji and Mohamed Makiya, developed a regional concrete brutalism that fused modern structure with abstracted Mesopotamian and Islamic motifs; the Ministry of Interior (1974) belongs to this ambitious state building programme of the 1970s.