Plan for Greater Baghdad

Exploring the ideological associations of Iraq’s buildings and monuments, Ala Younis’s Plan for Greater Baghdad is composed of models, documents, and found materials. The installation was inspired by a set of 35 mm slides taken in 1982 by architect Rifat Chadirji, which depicts a Baghdad gym designed by Le Corbusier and named after Saddam Hussein. Younis presents the gym’s development in the form of two twenty-five-year timelines leading up to its construction in 1980. These parallel architectural narratives reveal much about the history of Baghdad during a turbulent period that witnessed five military coups and the rise to power of six different heads of state. The work’s title refers to Frank Lloyd Wright’s unrealized late-1950s proposal for a cultural complex and university on the outskirts of the city.