…State University, for Wright was quick to salvage at least some of his ideas.

The centrepiece of Wright’s Baghdad project—nothing short of a new civic centre—was to be the Crescent Opera and Civic Auditorium. To be dominated by a ceiling shaped ‘like a great horn’, the planned theatre would have a crescent-shaped proscenium arch, ‘to carry sounds as hands would be cupped above the mouth’. A series of arches would have begun at the proscenium. Wright cited the Chicago Auditorium (now part of Roosevelt University) by his great predecessors Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan as another influence on the design: ‘the most successful room for opera and large audiences in existence’, he called it. Flexible seating was planned, though the exact number of seats was never finalized. Various notes and plans show anything between 1,600 and 2,000 for opera performances, with the possibility of accommodating many thousands more on civic occasions. Some Islamic shapes—the crescent itself, and the mosque-like dome—were intended to make the building as inspiring ‘as any religious edifice’, though it is hard to be sure how greatly that would have been appreciated by the distinctly secular and westernized clientele who would have used it. Still, the plans clearly mark the direction of Mecca. They also show a planetarium in the basement. The island was to have been landscaped with orchards and fountains, and would have been dominated by a 300-foot-high, ziggurat-like moment to Harun al-Rashid, intended to have a beacon effect comparable to the Statue of Liberty.

More puzzlingly, there is no indication of what might have been performed there operatically. Indeed, Baghdad never seems to have had much of an operatic life, certainly not compared with the ambitious seasons in Teheran in the late 1960s and early ’70s under the Shah’s patronage. (The opera house that opened there in 1967 was a much less original piece of architecture, having been modelled on the houses of Munich and Vienna.)

Wright’s 1957 plan distilled an imagined memory of the ancient Abbasid city and went back even further to one of the oldest myths of mankind, the story of Adam and Eve. Quite apart from the political events that scuppered it, it was dismissed by modernist commentators at the time as an anachronistic phantasmagoria. But Mina Marefat (whose chapter on the Baghdad project in Anthony Alofsin’s Frank Lloyd Wright: Europe and Beyond I gratefully acknowledge as the most useful source in researching this topic) persuasively argues that Wright’s work stands as a valuable symbol today, by showing profound respect for the very cultural heritage to which the west is supposed to be hostile. ‘The functions of an opera house, a civic centre and a university were clearly modern ones,’ she says, ‘but Wright gave them forms that linked them to the past and imbued them with didactic cultural messages, collective images shared by both east and…

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