He founded the Bauhaus and an influential Cambridge firm. But his greatest unfinished project would have reshaped Baghdad.

Harbvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum,Gift Of Ise Gropius, BRGA 124-7 A Man, A Plan: Walter Gropius in front of his Baghdad faculty tower.

One of Iraq's richest resources—its history—has been under attack in recent weeks, as the Sunni extremist group ISIS has been blowing up Shia mosques, Christian sites, and other ancient shrines to advance its fundamentalist vision of the future. The purported Biblical tomb of Jonah was a recent casualty. These depressing acts of destruction can be seen on video, as the militants combine high-tech capability with their desire to take Iraq back, if not quite to the Stone Age, then to somewhere comfortably pre-modern.

Not too many years ago, within living memory, Iraq stood for the exact opposite idea. Its history was an uncontested point of pride—and even more significantly, Baghdad was in the vanguard of a movement to build a better post-war world. Like Brasilia and other dream cities, in the 1950s it tried to become a place where a better future might be glimpsed—a place of hope, daring, and possibility. Accordingly, it became, for a few years, a site of fascination for the world’s leading architects, including one right here in Boston.

Under the leadership of a young and moderate king, Faisal II, Iraq was moving forward boldly in the 1950s, shedding all vestiges of British colonialism, channeling oil revenues into development projects, and inviting the world’s most ambitious designers to write the country’s next chapter. That meant a new look for its capital. Baghdad would be a place where one could dare to dream big, and all the avatars of Modernism answered the call. The iconic French brutalist Le Corbusier designed a huge sports complex, with a metal roof based on his idea of a tent in Eden (it was later built as the Saddam Hussein Sports Complex). Frank Lloyd Wright was poised to get the opera house. Jose Luis Sert, Gio Ponti, and Alvar Aalto had other pieces of the pie.....Continue Reading

> via The Boston Globe