What’s Buried by Baghdad’s Construction Boom

Baghdad’s architecture is extraordinary: crumbling art deco neighborhoods, a Le Corbusier gymnasium, and the great railway station built by the British using all the hot weather architectural tricks they’d learned on the subcontinent. Mid-century modernism flourished here too, in a post-1958 revolutionary climate of cultural optimism with new money from oil. Walter Gropius and a firm called The Architects Collaborative planned Baghdad University. Iraqi architects like Mohamed Makiya and Rifat Chadirji wove echoes of Abbasid and Mesopotamian forms into a modern but distinctly local style. A walk in this city can take you along the tree-lined banks of the Tigris, past Ottoman brickwork, 1930s villas, and 1970s concrete futurism. It is layered, fragile, and unlike anywhere else.

BAGHDAD—It is early morning. A cool breeze blows off the Tigris. I stand in a Baghdad street and look at the map in my hand and then again at the door and wonder if I’m in the right place. A cat eyes me from the crumbling wall. I’m looking for the house of Isaac Amit, who lived here until 1971. His family fled Iraq after the Ba’ath party came to power; they were among the last members of Baghdad’s Jewish community to leave the city. In my hand is a drawing of the house sent to me by Amit. “I remember every corner,” he tells me. “I remember it very well, because all my life I’ve been only at that place.” I wish I knew the city as well as Isaac. In front of me are dozens of crumbling houses, each with its own story. Despite Amit’s drawing, I can’t figure out which one was once his. I walk on.

BAGHDAD—It is early morning. A cool breeze blows off the Tigris. I stand in a Baghdad street and look at the map in my hand and then again at the door and wonder if I’m in the right place. A cat eyes me from the crumbling wall. I’m looking for the house of Isaac Amit, who lived here until 1971. His family fled Iraq after the Ba’ath party came to power; they were among the last members of Baghdad’s Jewish community to leave the city. In my hand is a drawing of the house sent to me by Amit. “I remember every corner,” he tells me. “I remember it very well, because all my life I’ve been only at that place.” I wish I knew the city as well as Isaac. In front of me are dozens of crumbling houses, each with its own story.