Rifat Chadirji, the prominent Iraqi architect, photographer and author, has died in London at the age of 93 after contracting COVID-19.
In 1974, at the age of 48, Chadirji was jailed for life for refusing to work on a government-funded project during the Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr presidency. But he was released after two years when Saddam Hussein came to power and served as Hussein’s architectural consultant for Baghdad City Planning between 1982 and 1983.
Chadirji was a also prolific photographer, and amassed an archive of 80,000 photographs documenting social life in Iraq from the late 1950s through the early 80s.
He moved to Boston in the 1980s where he taught philosophy at Harvard University, before permenently relocating to London.
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On his 90th birthday, the Tamayouz Excellence Award launched the Rifat Chadirji Prize for Architecture, a “thematic and international competition focusing on design proposals responding to local challenges and opportunities.”
