Iraqi architect, author and theoretician, Rifat Chadirji, whose buildings defined the skyline of Baghdad and writings reshaped modernism in Iraq and the Middle East, died in London on 10 April, 2020 at the age of 94.
Rifat Chadirji, the Baghdad-born architect and the co-founder of the award-winning architectural and engineering practice Iraq Consult, has left an incredible impact on the built environment of Iraq. His influence and importance, which extends beyond built projects, remains greatly felt today.
Rifat was not just renowned for his work in the Middle East and the Arab world: in 1982 and 1987, he was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and the American Institute of Architecture respectively; in 1986, he was awarded the Chairman Award of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture; and in 2015, he received an Honorary Doctorate from Coventry University and was the recipient of Tamayouz’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
After leaving Iraq in the 1980s and moving to Boston, he taught philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University for seven years. In his publications, written in Arabic and English, Rifat continuously challenged the classical and current concepts of the relationship between content and form and called for reassessment of some aspects of existing theories in art and architecture.