What we left behind
The architectural heritage of Jewish Baghdad
I. Ninburg (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
E.J.G.C. van Dooren – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
R.R.J. van de Pas – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
In the early 1950s almost the entire Jewish community of Baghdad left within a few months. Roughly ninety thousand people, about a quarter of the city, gone. What they left behind was not empty space. It was a built communal environment shaped and refined over centuries: houses, courtyards, schools and synagogues that encoded a way of living attuned to Baghdad’s heat and to the rules of a dense communal life. The community is gone. The architecture, where it survives, still holds the spatial knowledge that produced it, but it has been abandoned, cut off from the use and the spatial logic that once set it in motion.
How can we reactivate this architectural knowledge? To test this, the corpus is read indirectly, through archival drawings, photographs, surviving objects, and interviews with the Baghdadi-Jewish diaspora, and analysed into twenty-two recurring spatial patterns. They work in three fields. Climate, as the relation between the body and its surroundings, set against Baghdad’s hot weather. The threshold, which regulates the distance between the resident and the street, treated as exposed and unclaimed, turning on the question of protection. And gathering, which organises the relation between a person and their community. These patterns are then put to work through interventions in the last building that gave the Jewish community a space of assembly, a kind of urban salon known as the Frank Iny School, with the aim of bringing it back into use.
The patterns are read as principles rather than fixed forms. Read this way, they allow classical means to be used again within a contemporary context, and they open up an inquiry into materials and techniques that lost their place over the years. The building, left in abandonment and neglect, becomes again a place to stay, to make, and to gather. The knowledge studied in these buildings returns to life not as historical reconstruction but as a living principle for present-day residents. The method is offered as a procedure for any architectural corpus that is dispersed, partly destroyed or closed to direct visit.