Building the Non-Aligned Babel: Babylon Hotel in Baghdad and Mobile Design in the Global Cold War

Rising from the banks of the Tigris like a modern-day ziggurat, Babylon Hotel in Baghdad establishes a direct transhistorical link between Iraq’s ancient past and its modern identity. Its history, however, traces a more convoluted line, pointing to the uncanny mobility of architectural design and its paths through the networks of the Non-Aligned Movement. The hotel was originally designed in the early 1970s by the Slovenian architect Edvard Ravnikar for the booming tourist industry on the Adriatic coast of socialist Yugoslavia. After the project fell through, however, the design was sold to the Iraqi government, which aimed to open it on the occasion of the Seventh Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, scheduled for 1982. On its completion, the hotel came to be operated by the Indian luxury chain Oberoi. The paper analyzes Babylon Hotel as a case study in the internationalization of the building culture during the Cold War, revealing a recurrent conflation of tourism industry and political representation. It challenges the assumption that architectural modernity “flows” unidirectionally from the West to the East and from the North to the South, and points to more convoluted routes.