Too Big to Fail Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown’s Design for the State Mosque of Baghdad

In 1982 the architect Rifat Chadirji—then a consultant for the municipality of Baghdad—organized an international competition for a new gigantic mosque to be built in the Iraqi capital. The highest echelon of Iraqi political power was behind the idea in an attempt by Saddam Hussein, hungry for cultural legitimacy, to link himself to the long thread of national and regional history.