Secular vision of a prominent Iraqi family

The Chadirji family – several of whose members helped shape modern Iraq – renew an uphill bid to promote their ideals.

from the March 24, 2008 edition

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Othman says that his Kurdish parliamentary bloc, the second largest and allied to ruling Shiite and Sunni Islamists, would be the first to rally behind the secularists should they organize better. Othman blames the US for abandoning secularists in Iraq.

But politics is not the only realm of the Chadirjis. Rifat Chadirji, another son of Kamil senior, is considered one of the country's foremost architects and designers. Since 1982, he has lived with his wife, Balqees, a novelist, in London and in a home he designed overlooking the Mediterranean in Halat, Lebanon.

He has written 12 books and is working on another about the ever-shifting urban and architectural landscape in Iraq.

Rifat studied architecture in Britain and returned to Iraq in 1952 to start his own practice. He was determined to fuse Western modernity, inspired by the German Bauhaus movement and the works of The Architects Collaborative (TAC) , based in Boston, with Iraqi traditions as a symbol for Iraq's democratic ambitions.

"He was among the first generation of foreign-educated architects who came back to build a new Iraq," says Caecilia Pieri, a Paris-based scholar.

His many works include the Central Post, the Telegraph and Telephone tower, still damaged by the bombardment of Baghdad in 2003, and the nearby Federation of Industries building on Khulani Square, with its distinctive facade that evokes the famed bay windows of southern Iraq amid a thoroughly modern structure. He also tried to express this same mix in furniture and abstract photos from his travels capturing scenes of the daily lives of average Iraqis.

The whims of the Baath regime landed him at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison in 1978 and the whims of Saddam Hussein got him out two years later. Mr. Hussein made him his architectural adviser and tasked him with rebuilding Baghdad as a utopian metropolis in time for a major conference in 1982. Rifat had two choices: accept the commission or stay in prison.

At one point, Rifat was managing 70 projects. Then the Iraq-Iran war started. Rifat left and has never come back. He was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University for one year and ended up staying in Cambridge, Mass., for nine years. "I was told Saddam wanted to make my name eternal," says Rifat during an interview at his home in Lebanon.

The Iraqi government now wants to rebuild Rifat's avant-garde monument to the unknown soldier in Firdous Square. The monument was demolished in 1982 to make way for a statue of Hussein, which was brought down by US soldiers in April 2003.

Rifat takes it in stride. "For more than 2,000 years there has been no stability in Iraq. We have either had tyrants or feuding gangs," he says. "Every new group that comes demolishes everything and starts over again."

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