John Brian Cooper (1899–1983) was the British architect who served King Faisal I as official architect to the Hashemite state in Iraq, and he worked from Baghdad across three decades of the monarchy. His documented Iraqi output is small but consequential: the Royal Mausoleum of 1934–36, a parliament building of 1951–57, and the palace of 1956–57 now known as the Republican Palace. Elizabeth Bishop reads the mausoleum as a deliberately cosmopolitan object, taking the scale and central dome of Britain's royal burial ground at Frogmore and setting them against Abbasid, Ottoman and pan-Arab references. Cooper is one of the very few named designers of Iraq's Mandate and monarchy period, and his career is a reminder that state architecture there was, for a generation, commissioned from Britons.
