Central Post Office by Rifat Chadirji

ID Classics celebrates buildings, personalities and objects that have left their mark on the fields of design and architecture. This month we pay tribute to prominent modern Iraqi architect, Rifat Chadirji, who passed away aged 93, this April during the COVID-19 pandemic

- Aidan Imanova

A celebrated figured of modern Iraqi architecture, Rifat Chadirji’s buildings are exemplary of local construction techniques applied through a modernist lens, a style he called ‘international regionalism’. Chadirji devised a synthesis of form that referenced tradition, but one that hoped to modernise its architectural language by drawing from international styles, while guiding the creation of a genuinely modern urban landscape for Iraq in the latter part of the 20th century.

“I set out to learn from traditional architecture, he once said, “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.”