The Mosaic Rooms is delighted to present a lecture by Dr Caecilia Pieri on Thursday 1st March 2012, 7pm on the modern built landscape and beautiful physical reality of the city of Baghdad.

Despite the images of Iraq that have been flooding the Western media for the last eight years, following thirty years of censorship resulting in scarce communication, the city of Baghdad is neither a devastated heap of ruins, nor a formless “puddle”. The portrayal of this ancient city on television networks worldwide has been reduced to a series of abusively loud, stereotyped and impoverished metonymies. It is true that the current context has created a siege-like situation, which always makes a city ugly; and it is undeniable that the habitat has in part become unkempt and dilapidated, as a result of an archaic real estate system. But the intrinsic qualities, variety and originality of Baghdad’s twentieth century built environment make it imperative to treat it as an important part of modern architectural history.

Caecilia Pieri received her PhD in the history of architecture and urbanism with a focus on the transformation of Baghdad from 1921 to 1958.

She originally graduated in French Literature and Italian. Since 1989 she has been a senior editor of academic publications of architecture, heritage and urban studies in Paris. She serves now as the Head of the Urban Observatory at the French Institute of the Near-East (Beirut) where she brings a comparative approach to the field of urban planning in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern studies. She has published many scholarly articles and is the author of Baghdad Arts Deco (American University of Cairo Press, 2011) also translated into Arabic.

Places strictly limited, please RSVP info@mosaicrooms.org / 020 7370 9990