(1926- )

Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Chadirji was educated at the Hammersmith School of Arts and Crafts in England. There he came under the influence of architects such as Auguste Perret, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe and the town planner Arthur Korn.

He returned to Baghdad 1952 and founded the firm Iraq Consult. He was advisor to the mayor of Baghdad, and instrumental in commissioning leading international architects to build large-scale complexes. These included Frank Lloyd Wright (Opera House), Le Corbusier (Sports Hall), Walter Gropius (University City), Alvar Aalto (Art Museum), Werner March (Museum), and Pier Luigi Nervi. Of these only the Sports Hall and the University City were completed.

From 1956 to 1962, Chaderji designed houses. In 1960 he was commissioned to design a monument in Baghdad for the Workers' Housing Scheme and he chose the arch of Ctesiphon in Iran as his symbolic motif.

Between 1964 and 1979 he began to use traditional Islamic elements and materials. During this period he designed: the Veterinary Hospital (1964), the Academy of Science in Baghdad (1965), the School for Veterinary Medicine in Baghdad (1965-1967), and the Tobacco Monopoly.

In the late 1960s, Chadirji's worked in other Arab countries: he built housing complexes in Kuwait (1967-1968), a cinema and office building in Bahrain (1968), plans for a hospital in Riyadh (1977), for the Dharan Medical Center and Dental Clinic (1977), and for the National Theater in Abu Dhabi (1977). The most important aspect of Chadirji's work, apparent in his writings and in his buildings, is his insight into the process of creating an architecture that merges ancient and modern into a new solution.

Chadirji wrote in a number of publications, among them “Taha Street”, “Hammersmith” and “Concepts and Influences: Towards a Regionalized International Architecture: 1952-1978”, published in 1987. In 1991 he published a book devoted to the major work of the Iraqi past: The Ukhaidir and the Crystal Palace.

Chadirji designed a wide range of building types: commercial, educational, and residential, orphanages in Dohuk and Arbil (1969) and the Institute for the Deaf, Mute, and Mentally Retarded (1970).

He was awarded Chairman's Award for Lifetime Achievements by the Aga Khan Development Network in 1986. It was given to Chaderji, “Iraqi architect, critic and teacher, for a lifetime dedicated to the search for an appropriate contemporary architectural expression that synthesises elements of the rich Islamic cultural heritage with key principles of the international architecture of the 20th century. Chadirji believes that architecture's future lies in lessons learned from its past. His designs are transformations of regional forms that seek to express, by means of abstraction, the construction technologies in almost universal use today, while affirming the aesthetic values the latter engender. “

He left Iraq for United States in 1983.

References: http://www.akdn.org/agency/akaa/; http://arabworld.nitle.org/