Rifat Chadirji (Baghdad 1926 – London 2020) is the central figure of modern Iraqi architecture. He returned to Baghdad in 1952, joined the Modern Baghdad Group and founded the practice Iraq Consult, and over the next quarter-century designed more than a hundred buildings — banks, post offices, villas, monuments — worked out in the local fired brick and reinforced concrete. He called the result "international regionalism": modern in construction, regional in the arch, the screen and the deep shadow that answer Baghdad's heat and light. He was equally important as a photographer, documenting with his father Kamil tens of thousands of Iraqi and regional buildings, an archive that became the foundation of the field after decades of war destroyed much of what it recorded. He received the Aga Khan Chairman's Award in 1986.
