Date de publication:
Mardi 05 Juin 2012 - 10:23
Publié ici :
05 Juin 2012Mis à jour le :
24 Juin 2017Mots-clefs:
- hypotheses.org
- blog
- architecture
- Irak
- Le Corbusier
- Bagdad
Zone géographique:
- Moyen-Orient
Carnets de l'Ifpo: The Le Corbusier Gymnasium in Baghdad: discovery of construction archives (1974 -1980)
The story begins end 2004, along with the very first research engaged for a thesis –concerning the urban and architectural transformations of the XXth century Baghdad, after three successive stays in Baghdad since June 2003. In June 1955, commissions were passed to world-famous architects by Nuri Said's government via the Development Board, a governmental body created in 1950 in charge of developing new infrastructures throughout the whole country. There was a huge University campus by Walter Gropius, an opera-house by Frank Lloyd Wright, a building for the Ministry of Planning by the Italian Gio Ponti, a Civic Center by the Dutch Marinus Dudok, a Museum by the Finnish Alvar Aalto, etc. The aim of such a series of grand constructions was to endow the Iraqi capital with a modernist development, an ambition amply justified at the time by the country's petrol booming revenues1. As concerns Le Corbusier he was to build an Olympic city, including a 50000 people capacity stadium, a gymnasium with a stage holding 3500 spectators, a pool for 5000 spectators, but also a basin with a "wave mechanism", an outdoors amphitheater, several training grounds, "nautical amusements". If indeed, some of these schemes were implemented in the following ten years, others, for instance those of Wright or Aalto, never came to be. As for Le Corbusier's commission, it was only implemented partially and much later, with finally only the gymnasium being built in the spring of 1980. Yet this construction's destiny is singular.
Posthumous, mysterious, controversial: a work fallen into oblivion
Researchers having worked on the subject are very rare and this is all the more surprising given Le Corbusier's abundantly commented work as author and architect in the Western world. Yet the Gymnasium suffers from the plight of being a posthumous work. Like the Saint-Pierre de Firminy Church (France), which was completed in 2006 by one of Le Corbusier's collaborators, José Oubrerie, the gymnasium which was completed in 1980 does not bear the master's signature. Which is why its attribution is controversial: a "controversial", "mysterious" work, it is neither listed in L'Œuvre complete, the "bible" of corbusean studies which was printed in several volumes between 1957 and 1965, nor in the catalogue of the 1987 Retrospective organized by the Pompidou Centre in Paris. In 2008, it was presented in an exhibition in Barcelona among some other great architectural schemes presented above; yet however pioneering this could seem, the event which was inaugurated by the Queen was perhaps a political gesture as much as a cultural one.
Contested by the purists, built just before the war against Iran, the Gymnasium, what with many other aspects of modern Iraq, fell into oblivion because the country was isolated, manipulated by the dictatorship, and this was made worse by the wars and the thirteen years ravages caused by the embargo4. One of the paradoxes, and not the least, of the American invasion of 2003, is thus to have allowed Iraq and the Le Corbusier Gymnasium to break free from this imposed silence.
(...)
Par Caecilia Pieri
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