New Lights for Aladdin

With Iraq's government enriched by oil revenues of more than $200,000,000 a year, the ancient city of Baghdad (pop. 750,000) is planning a future almost as glittering as its past. The sun-baked Abode of Peace by the Tigris has a new bridge, new Royal Palace and Parliament buildings, a TV station and its first air-conditioned movie. It has started slum clearance and flood control, and its ancient irrigation system, in ruins since Hu-lagu the Mongol destroyed it in 1258, is being rebuilt. To top off the all-out effort to make the new Baghdad as great as the monumental city of 2,000,000 that was the setting for the Arabian Nights, the city has summoned great architects from around the world.

France's Le Corbusier will design a massive sports stadium; Finland's Alvar Aalto is at work designing a civic center, with library and art gallery; Germany's Werner March is drafting plans for a $3,500,000 museum; Walter Gropius' Cambridge (Mass.) Architects Collaborative hopes to have a plan for a new university, with mosque, ready by next September; Italy's Designer-Architect Gio Ponti has already designed a ten-story headquarters for the Iraq Development Board and an eight-story office building for GORA (Government Oil Refineries Administration).

Garden of Eden. Last week the most grandiose plan of them all, Frank Lloyd Wright's Grand Opera and Civic Auditorium, was unveiled. It is a fantasia right out of the Arabian Nights, and Wright, 88, a self-confessed Arabian Nighter since boyhood, meant it to be that way. "If we are able to understand and interpret our ancestors," Wright intoned, "there is no need to copy them. Nor need Baghdad adopt the materialistic structures called 'modern' now barging in from the West upon the East."

Wright found his site the Wright way. Circling in over Baghdad by airplane, he spotted a long narrow island in the middle of the Tigris. He discovered that it was royal property, went straight to King Feisal II. Recounts Wright: "The young king took me by the arm, smiled and said, 'It is yours.' " Unimpressed by its popular name, Pig Island, Wright promptly rechristened it Edena (for the Garden of Eden). He soon noted an unancient problem: newly prosperous Baghdad is rapidly filling up with automobiles. His solution is in the earthen ziggurats that Harun al-Rashid used in the 8th century to keep out invaders. In Wright's case the massive embankments serve as traffic roundabouts and parking areas to keep pedestrian ways free of traffic and open for fountains, gardens and walks.

Peerless on Earth. For the opera house, Old Master Wright designed "a glorification of acoustics, making of it a poetic circumstance." A mighty crescent rises out of lagoons to the apex of the combined opera house and civic auditorium. Beneath the auditorium is a planetarium; on top, a crenelated cupola housing "Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp." Close by, soars a towering TV antenna in the form of Mohammed's sword. For his more mundane second commission, a central post office building, Wright sunk the main floor 11 ft. into the earth to get away from the heat, screened the glass sides with pendant iron grille, left a spacious interior garden court with fountains.

Then in a burst of enthusiasm, Wright made Baghdad a present of a whole new city plan, with his Garden of Eden as the center (ignoring the fact that a British firm has already drawn one master plan). Wright's largesse may fall on barren ground, and many a hot summer may pass before his expensive, expansive opera house is built in a city which has never known opera. But Wright is sure all will come to pass. "Thus carried out," he says, "Baghdad will become peerless among the cities of the world."

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