Frank Lloyd Wright Does Baghdad?

In the 1950s Frank Lloyd Wright went to Baghdad and drew up plans for “rebuilding Baghdad into a glittering capital of Islamic culture like the one that once dazzled the world.” Librarians at the Library of Congress in Washington DC have the plans, and some suggest they should be used. “Iraqis think we want to kill their culture. Yet when America’s greatest architect drew a plan for Baghdad in 1957, where did he turn for inspiration? Not to American or European ‘modernism,’ which was so fashionable at the time, but to Arab and Persian architecture, which had shaped the famous Baghdad of the 8th and 9th century.”