Rifat Chadirji, a world renowned international architect from Iraq, has passed away in London following a positive diagnosis for COVID-19.

Chadirji was born in on December 6, 1926 and passed away April 10, 2020. 

Throughout a long career, Chadirji helped to develop and propagate a new pan-Arab architectural language that fused traditional architectural forms and building approaches with modern materials, building technologies, and functional uses. 

Born into an influential political family in Baghdad while the Iraqi territories were under “British administration,” Chadirji studied architecture at the Hammersmith School of Arts & Crafts in London, graduating in 1952 with a degree in architecture. Upon graduating, Chadirji started the Iraq Consult IQC group, an architectural practice that he used as a launching pad for his inventive “architectural experiments.” Two years later, back in Iraq, he was appointed as the director of the Building Department of the Iraqi Waqf, a body that oversaw the construction of mosques and the protection of heritage buildings. 

Among the architects best-known works are the Tobacco Monopoly Headquarters, the Central Post Office, and the Hamood Villa in Baghdad. One of his most iconic works, the Monument to the Unknown Soldier in Baghdad, was demolished in the early 1980s. He also designed the National Insurance Company in Mosul.

During his early career, he was a member of the Baghdad Modern Art Group, a collective artists and thinkers that sought to reinterpret and deploy traditional motifs through a contemporary lens. This creative backdrop fueled Chadirji’s architectural experiments, which combined arches and barrel vaulted roofs, slender lancet windows, niches, and other traditional elements in a material palette that included buff-colored masonry, brut concrete, and smooth plaster finishes. Picking and choosing between traditional and contemporary elements—an arched roof here, a ribbon window there—Chadirji’s worked to, as he put it in a 2018 interview with Middle East Architect, “learn from traditional architecture and to achieve a synthesis between traditional forms and inevitable advent of modern technology. My aim was to create an architecture which at once acknowledges the place in which it is built, yet which sacrifices nothing to modern technical capability.”

In another converstaion, The National reports, Chadirji stated, “From the very outset of my practice, I thought it imperative that, sooner or later, Iraq create for itself an architecture regional in character yet simultaneously modern, part of the current international avant-garde style," he said of the description of his work.”

In 1974, Chadirji was imprisoned in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison after refusing to work on a government project spearheaded by the then Iraqi President, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. Over a 20 month confinement, Chadirji wrote a series of influential books, materials for which were smuggled into the prison by his wife, Balqees. Chadirji was released from prison by Saddam Hussein, in part, so that he could work on a new national conference center slated to host an international gathering. Chadirji worked with the Hussein government and with the Baghdad municipality to helm the city’s reconstruction during this period, but ultimately left Iraq in 1983 to take up a teaching position at Harvard University. 

In 1986, he won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for lifetime achievement, and more recently, the Graham Foundation in Chicago held an exhibition celebrating his intellectual and architectural contributions the field, which included photographic works documenting traditional building and living arrangements. 

In 2015, Chadirji was awarded the Tamayouz Architectural Lifetime Achievement Award. 

In 2017, the Tamayouz foundation launched the Rifat Chadirji Prize to focus on “proposing designs responding to local challenges in Iraq.” The prize, according to the organizers, “aims to introduce Iraq and its challenges to the world and invite them to submit their ideas and to establish an uncompromising open source of ideas tackling social issues in Iraq through design."

Chadirji’s archives are held at the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT. Nasser Rabbat, Aga Khan Professor and the Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT described Chadirji in a statement published on the MIT website as “a thinker, author, critic, [and] rationalist architect with a refined aesthetic sensitivity, he devised a particular approach to architecture that he called international regionalism.”