Baghdad Gymnasium

In summer 1955 the Iraqi government asked Le Corbusier to draw up plans for Baghdad's Olympic stadium, and he agreed as early as 5 July, delighted at last to give shape to his theoretical work on the place of sport in town planning. The project really got going in November 1957: during his first stay in Baghdad, from 7 to 10 November, Le Corbusier met the ministers for sport and for development and set out his main ideas on planning and architecture to the Iraqi engineers' order.

The original programme combined a 50,000-seat Olympic stadium, a pool with stands for 5,000, a 3,500-seat gymnasium and a 3,000-seat open-air amphitheatre. Throughout the design, Le Corbusier kept gathering information on other stadiums and how they worked, from the stands of San Siro in Milan to the Maracanã in Rio and the ancient theatre of Orange; in 1958 he also went to the Parc des Princes to study its crowd flows. On 13 July 1958 the Iraqi development board approved the whole scheme, one day before the army coup that brought down the monarchy. The project survived, but until mid-1959 it was often held up and altered several times; in May 1959 the Iraqi government summoned Le Corbusier again to discuss a change of site. In 1960 and 1961 the land allocation changed many times, and from 1963 regular revisions stripped the scheme of many features, among them the pool and the concrete canopy on the west side. The work was split between the studio at 35 rue de Sèvres and the design office of the associated engineer Georges-Marc Présenté, whose team handed 540 drawings to the Iraqi government in spring 1964. The political instability of the 1960s put the project in doubt.

It was revived from 1973 under the aegis of Saddam Hussein, to expand Iraq's sports facilities. Georges-Marc Présenté carried out the gymnasium and the open-air amphitheatre, with the architect Axel Mesny directing the work. Finished in 1980, the building keeps to the design except for a few changes, among them dropping the garden. It went on to host generations of Iraqi athletes, among them basketball and volleyball players and gymnasts, as well as international competitions. For a time it bore Saddam Hussein's name, and from 2003 the US armed forces used it as a prison.

From the outset the gymnasium was the most advanced part of the scheme: its final 1958 version had 4,800 seats rather than the 3,500 first planned. The only covered building in the complex, it was designed with air conditioning. When presenting it, Le Corbusier suggested it could also serve for leisure, such as cinema or theatre, as he had already envisaged nearly thirty years before for his stadium for popular celebrations and for the Ville radieuse. The project also drew on his work on the stadiums of Chandigarh and Firminy. When it was built, the gymnasium's very smooth concrete surfaces were the work of a Japanese firm.

The original design set a garden beside the gymnasium; it was never laid out. From 1955 Le Corbusier enquired about which species to plant around the stadium, and asked his contacts on the spot several times for a list of native species.

The gymnasium can be seen from outside.