‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change’ – thus Don Fabrizio is warned in Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard. The elites of Hashemite Iraq would have understood this injunction well. There, officials from old families with Turkish titles planned to tear down Ottoman Baghdad and erect a hypermodern, planned city.

In 1950, the Hashemite monarchy was in trouble. Large sections of Iraqi society had never accepted Britain’s occupation of Mesopotamia, and the country had been shaken by several revolts and coups, most recently in 1941, when the Regent had fled, only to be reinstated by British forces. Young Arab nationalists were outraged at how, in 1948, Arab Palestine was dismembered by the armies of Israel and Jordan, Iraq’s Hashemite ally. In Baghdad, nationalist ministers scapegoated the country’s ancient Jewish community, almost none of whom had Zionist sympathies. Britain’s duplicity over Suez in 1956 would further embarrass the Iraqi government.

But the Prime Minister, Nuri al-Said Pasha, perceived opportunities, too. Knowing that Britain needed Iraq as a trading partner and as a bulwark against Communism, Nuri renegotiated Iraq’s oil treaty with its former colonial rulers. Revenues grew sixfold, and Nuri sequestered Iraq’s oil income into a new national development fund, betting that by modernising Iraq, he could dazzle his opponents and hold the monarchical system together.

At Athens’ Doxiadis Archives, archivist Giota Pavlidou unrolls a large scroll. It is a master plan for Baghdad – created in 1959 by the Greek urbanist Constantinos Doxiadis. Replacing a previous plan proposed by a British architectural practice, the Doxiadis scheme for Iraq’s capital looks like an abstract painting. A giant oblong – split into a grid and coloured in deep blues and yellows – looks like it has fallen from outer space into the Mesopotamian plain; the River Tigris snakes its way through the geometrical shapes. Doxiadis, who would go on to design Islamabad and to remodel Riyadh, wanted every inhabitant of the new metropolis to live close to water, and so stretched the urban expansion upstream and downstream, rather than eastwards and westwards into the steppe. On an ancillary document, one of Doxiadis’ team scrawled ‘SECOND GARDEN OF EDEN (NO APPLE TREES ALLOWED)’.

The Iraqi government were acutely aware that Baghdad had a housing shortage. Decades of land reform had strengthened the rights of tribal sheikhs at the expense of their tenants, leading to urban migration. By 1955, an estimated 107,025 rural migrants – known as the sarāʾif, after their reed houses (sarīfa) – lived on the outskirts of the capital, providing informal labour and keeping buffaloes for milk and a type of clotted cream called qaymar.

Doxiadis admired the reed houses, whose construction methods are thought to derive from Sumerian ancestors such as the house carved into the Uruk Trough in the British Museum (3300-3000 BC). But the sarāʾif lived in desperate poverty, with no sanitation or health infrastructure. Dysentery and tuberculosis were common. The government wrote urgently to Doxiadis in April 1955 and asked him to start ‘some projects very quickly in and near Baghdad. There they can be seen, and publicised; and they can be observed for the experience they yield’.

Doxiadis flew to Baghdad immediately and set up offices. He worked quickly using local contractors and traditional sunbaked bricks, emphasising the importance of narrow, shaded streets ‘to allow the people to circulate in them with certain comfort’.

Scholars like David Harvey have taken a darker view of urban planning, noting, for example, how Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann drove long boulevards through Paris so that dragoons could trample any protester in their path. When Boris Johnson visited Iraq, he described the streets I was looking at on Doxiadis’ plan as ‘tank-friendly boulevards’. Was the Doxiadis plan for Baghdad nothing more than an architecture of social control? By employing the sarāʾif to build the brick dwellings in which they would eventually live, and by incorporating them into a modern system of public services, the Iraqi government certainly brought these rural migrants under direct state influence, for the first time perhaps in centuries. And by destroying the reed houses, the government had undoubtedly eliminated part of their heritage.

On the other hand, Doxiadis’ housing undoubtedly improved the health and living standards of Baghdad’s poorest. Furthermore, I found no direct evidence to suggest that his urban planning was motivated by policing concerns. Indeed, if Nuri had redesigned Baghdad to protect the government from coups and protests, Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim and his troops might not have succeeded in sweeping into the capital on 14 July 1958, killing Nuri and the king in a bloody coup.

Not satisfied by academic speculation alone, I went to Baghdad to see some of these buildings for myself. After a breakfast of qaymar and date molasses, my uncle and I drove along four-lane highways (‘saloon-car friendly’, I thought) to the Tigris, where the brown river bends to form a peninsula. Here, in the 1940s, my great-uncle, Khalid al-Qaṣṣāb, and a group of friends used to come and paint en plein air in the palm groves. Hidden amongst these palms today is Baghdad’s most ambitious modernist ensemble: the university, designed by Walter Gropius, the father of the Bauhaus, while working at the head of The Architects Collaborative (TAC).

Driving through the TAC’s concrete entrance arch, looking like a half-submerged paperclip, above us rose the brutalist Administration Tower – one of Baghdad’s first high-rises. Qasim, who took over the monarchy’s urban planning following his 1958 coup, insisted that the tower should be visible from his study in the Ministry of Defence eight miles away. From the dean’s office on the top floor, I could see another tower block – Zaha Hadid’s New Central Bank – under construction across the river. The dean’s secretary showed us around the quads. While I appreciated the rationality and harmony, including the greenery and the contrasts of light and space in Gropius’ architecture, I found it a little inexpressive.

The same could not be said for the People’s Gymnasium – designed by perhaps the greatest architect of the twentieth century, Le Corbusier, which my cousin and I approached through the flooded streets after a hailstorm. If it were not for the sign welcoming the visitor to the ‘Iraqi Volleyball Federation’, one might find it difficult to guess what this building was; it resembles a giant skateboarding ramp, with a typically Corbusian spiral access ramp spilling out of it like a traitor’s intestines in a Jacobean woodcut. Unlike at the university, the guards would not let us look around; they watched us suspiciously as we drove off. Nor could we loiter around the Ministry of Planning – designed by the Italian modernist Gio Ponti – in the now fortified district of the Iranian embassy. We had to admire the submarine-like plan and porthole-like windows of Ponti’s building from the across the river.

Baghdad’s most famous modernist project – Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Plan for Greater Baghdad’ – was never executed. Invited initially to design an opera house, Wright unexpectedly submitted designs for a vast cultural centre, spanning both banks of the Tigris. The centre would have been laid out on an axis to Mecca, with domes, fountains, minaret-like radio transmitters, and a statue of the fifth Abbasid caliph Harun al Rashid of Arabian Nights fame. Addressing the Iraqi Society of Engineers in 1957, Wright explained: ‘if you are to succeed in developing now here a life of your own it would be possible only from the interior inspiration of your great Arabic spirit in your antiquity’.

Wright was horrified, therefore, when he visited the inaugural exhibition of the Iraqi Artists’ Club, and discovered that Iraqi artists were making expressionist paintings, abstract sculpture and minimalist architecture. Scowling at the models of the young Iraqi architect Rifat Chadirji – white volumes stripped of all ornamentation – Wright exclaimed ‘I despise the influence of Le Corbusier!’ Chadirji took this as a compliment. Wright, who irritated his hosts by continually referring to Iraq as ‘Persia’, had badly misjudged Iraq’s relationship with modernity. Khalid al-Qaṣṣāb, in his memoirs, described Wright’s design as ‘closer to a Maharaja’s palace in India, or a Romantic castle in Disneyworld, than it was to revealing any trace of Baghdadi heritage’.

Baghdad’s architecture and urban planning offer lessons for how we understand societies undergoing rapid modernisation, and the ways we understand the artistic and cultural movements we call ‘modernism’.

First, the story of Doxiadis’ Master Plan offers an example of a traditional elite that could no longer rely on their aristocratic and spiritual authority. They knew that the social contract was broken and were trying to take some steps to fix it. Scholars of Iraq, notably the great Palestinian historian Hanna Batatu, describe how, by the 1950s, Iraq’s tribal and urban elites had set aside their quarrels and were governing the country to maximise their rents from oil and agriculture. But Doxiadis’ housing project – the biggest at the time in the Middle East – complicates the picture, showing that at the same time the government was committing huge resources to public goods for the capital’s poorest residents.

The restless world of 1950s Baghdad also reveals the political limits of state patronage of  art and architecture. Both the conservative Nuri and the radical Qasim needed to assert their modernity and dynamism to their opponents at home and abroad. Like countless politicians throughout history, they sought to achieve this by commissioning powerful art and architecture. They succeeded to the extent that many Iraqis today remember them nostalgically for the buildings, paintings and sculpture they commissioned. Yet they were ultimately felled in coups d’état.

Finally, the story of Wright’s designs and their frosty reception in Baghdad offers an example of a Western artist both exoticising and patronising his foreign audience by insisting that they use a historicist vocabulary rooted in their local history. Iraq’s young architects would, in time, return to a Mesopotamian and Islamic past. But in the 1950s, they were using concrete pilotis and white curtain walls; they were baffled by Wright’s domes and minarets. While the Plan for Greater Baghdad has subsequently come to symbolise the Hashemite monarchy’s ambition and dynamism, Iraq’s young architects at the time thought it alien and kitsch.

Wright died in 1959, and his plans were shelved. But in some respects, his spirit lived on. Mohamed Makiya, who had trained at Liverpool and Cambridge, restored the only surviving Abbasid minaret in the city, repairing its crisp muqarnas decoration and the Kufic ‘there is no god but God’ brickwork, and rebuilding the vanished mosque it had served. Inside, Makiya concealed the clerestory so that light shone around the dome. It seems to float in mid-air. Iraqi artists had never completely ignored their Mesopotamian and Islamic heritage, but they did not want Wright or anyone else telling them what to do.

Much of old Baghdad survived redevelopment, especially after the Qasim government accused Doxiadis of imperialism and expelled him from the country. Artists like Jewad Selim painted old buildings similar to the al-Qaṣṣāb house on the Tigris, which I now visited with my uncle. Old Baghdad houses typically have buff-coloured brick ground floors and overhanging first floors with delightful wooden mashrabiyyas. In summer, when temperatures can exceed 50°C, families would take their siestas in the sirdāb (undercroft), cooled through an early air conditioning technology. A type of chimney called a bādgīr would funnel a draught from the roof to the undercroft, cooling the air as it descended. My uncle and I walked a few yards along the Tigris to the neighbouring house, where Agatha Christie had lived.

One hot afternoon, when Baghdadis closed their shutters and retreated to bed, Khalid al-Qaṣṣāb’s youngest brother, my great uncle Saʿadūn, was bored. He slipped out of bed and escaped into the brilliant sunlight, to mess around on the street with some local boys. Panting outside his neighbour’s house, his dishdāsha (robe) covered in dust, Saʿadūn saw one of the shutters open, and an Englishwoman appear, squinting out onto the street. Saʿadūn and the other boys – who now scattered – had interrupted her siesta. Agatha Christie spotted Saʿadūn, returned inside, reappeared at the front door, and marched to my great uncle, scolding him for his ungentlemanly boisterousness, his disgraceful appearance, and for bringing the noble House of al-Qaṣṣāb into disrepute.

My uncle and I stood where Christie had shouted at Saʿadūn, and looked at her house. Abandoned, with cracking brickwork and sagging eaves, it was in desperate need of careful restoration. Ottoman Baghdad survived the ruthless optimism of the mid-twentieth century. I hoped it, and the rest of Iraq’s seven thousand years of human culture, could survive the chaos of the mid-twenty-first century.