In 1957, the Iraqi government commissioned Le Corbusier to plan an Olympic sports complex with a 100,000-seat stadium in the center; The master personally visited Baghdad and during the work on the project created 500 drawings and drawings, bringing it to detail. But already in 1958 a revolution took place in the country, and the plan of the overthrown authorities was consigned to oblivion. In 1965, Le Corbusier passed away, and this story had to end there.
But in 1982, already under Saddam Hussein, a small part of this plan was implemented - an athletics arena. The work was attended by one of Le Corbusier's partners, the French architect Georges-Marc Presente, who made sure that the building was exactly according to the project.
The building was actively used until the early 2000s, when the American troops who occupied Baghdad turned it into a barracks. Then the decline in all spheres of public life and the rampant terrorism put the resumption of sports competitions, and the building was empty. In 2005, the arena was discovered by Caecilia Pieri, a French researcher who was writing a dissertation on modern architecture (and its deplorable state) in Baghdad. She decided to draw public attention to her discovery, but the case went with difficulty.
Back in 2008-2009, an exhibition about Le Corbusier's "Olympic" project for Baghdad was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but the organizers did not mention the completed part. For their part, the specialists of the Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris, the main center for studying the heritage of the master of modernism, were not sure that the building corresponded to the original plan, but no one was in a hurry to check it in practice.
But Pieri managed to interest them, as well as his employer - the Paris Institute for the Middle East, as well as UNESCO, the University of Baghdad and the French Embassy in Iraq. Last year, restoration work began on the building that has provided a glimmer of hope for the Iraqi capital's rich modernist legacy, now crumbling. However, the current Iraqi authorities seem more interested in completely new buildings, such as those designed by Zaha Hadid, than in preserving monuments.
N. F.
