The question of belonging is one that haunts the work of Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski. His most recent releases – Ida, Cold War and now Fatherland – all ruminate on the theme in black and white, the loose trilogy united by its striking framing. The magnitude of the ideas these works explore and the performances they feature belie their tight sub-90-minute runtimes.

Pawlikowski’s latest project takes as its subject the German writer Thomas Mann. It follows Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) as they set out on an uncanny road trip across Germany in 1949, the first time the author has returned to the country in 16 years. The filmmaker tells Monocle about having the nerve to take on the story of one of Germany’s most beloved cultural heroes, the contemporary echoes of Fatherland’s postwar context and getting bored at the cinema.

This is the third and final part of a loose series after your films ‘Ida’ (2013) and ‘Cold War’ (2018). What unites the three projects?
I didn’t set out to do a trilogy. I’m looking back to the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s in central Europe because it’s a period that interests me, that I have a certain vision of and an angle on – as opposed to today’s world, which I have no idea how to describe or deal with.

The films all have a mixture of strong characters who are divided within themselves or in interesting relationships. History shapes them; it forces them to make decisions. Nowadays we live in a world where history is there but [it’s as if] it happens in the digital sphere. Nothing much actually happens in our lives in the West but we have strong opinions about everything.

The three films have a similar style: shot in black and white and created almost through a series of vignettes. How does this style allow you to tell these stories?
One thing that [the style] helps me with is the mise en scène, because discipline releases a lot of possibilities. I like working out the mise en scène in relation to a strong image. I like the audience to really look. I want to make a kind of photograph where there’s a lot in it to discover and then give you time to discover it. In all the recent films, I have tried to establish a certain way of looking from the very beginning. The audience – well, those who don’t leave the cinema after five minutes – tune into this way of watching. It’s powerful and absorbing once you do.

What’s your history with Thomas Mann and his work?
I have read many of his books but it’s not a passionate relationship. He’s not my favourite writer but he is a great one, and with age I’m discovering how great because there are layers and layers to his novels. But this episode in his life and his relationship with his daughter and son [Klaus, played by August Diehl] is really rich, and it’s something I can connect with. It’s a great triangle. Three great characters. That’s the reason I made it. Plus, I like the context – this polarised world.

Did you have any hesitation about using real figures as characters?
The characters in my films are inspired by real people but they are not portraits of them. In Germany, Thomas Mann is a sacred beast, so I knew I was stepping into dodgy territory. But weirdly, Germans love it. Fatherland has done super well in Germany. And they don’t seem to mind me fiddling with the facts because they can see it’s for the sake of greater intellectual and emotional truth.

Sandra Hüller is excellent as Erika Mann. Why was she right for the role?
Because she is a brilliant actress and is quite complicated. But above all, she’s a brilliant actress. She can convey so much with such small gestures. It probably wouldn’t work without her. Erika has a big range. She is this cynical intellectual; then she is scared like a little girl; then she is like a vicious beast that suddenly turns wild; then she is dreamy and vulnerable. So many things over the short duration of the film and there’s not a moment of emoting – signalling emotions. It all comes from inside.

Although these three films are set in the past, they have strong echoes in today’s world. Have you become more aware of that since ‘Fatherland’ was released? 
When we showed it at Cannes, a lot of Russians in exile came up to me and said, “You made a film about us because we have no home to go back to.” I could see why it echoes [in today’s world] but what’s surprised me is how consistent it has been that people come up to me, especially people who are in exile, to say that.

It feels a bit clichéd to comment on the length of your films but they are unusually short in today’s cinema landscape. What’s your process like?
It’s endless rewriting. I’m shooting and editing at the same time. Five days filming, then a day off and then one day in a cutting room, putting the scenes side by side.

Very often, I change stuff that I haven’t shot yet. I cut some things, fuse some stuff, invent new scenes. There’s no script that then gets shot. It’s more like a loose beginning, middle and end, and some good scenes – and some that are not so good – and then constant reworking and distilling, distilling, distilling to make sure that every beat resonates.

It’s all about what you come out with at the end of the film. And whether it was three hours long or it was 82 minutes doesn’t matter. It’s what stays with you and what you live through in the film. That’s why I have no guilty conscience. People talk about it for a long time afterwards.

When you go to the cinema, do you often think the film is too long?
Some films deserve to be but many have, like, three endings. Even very popular films. And then I just want to go home. The energy drops when you have a weak scene that’s just there to fill the space or because they paid for the location or something. I have a feeling that a lot of films are just executing a script that was okayed by the financiers. But I don’t mind long films, per se. Lawrence of Arabia couldn’t be any shorter, you know? I think every filmmaker has their own language. Well, the good ones anyway.

‘Fatherland’ is in UK cinemas from 23 October.

“We chose to live here because there’s still a sense of barrio,” says Borja Marco Moreno. “When we registered our new address at the municipal office, the clerk congratulated us. There’s a citywide admiration for this place.” Moreno and his partner, Daniela Barena Martinez, are residents of Valencia’s Finca Roja, a housing complex the size of a city block that was designed by Enrique Viedma Vidal and completed in 1934. It organises residents into 14 communities, each with its own lobby and staircase. The six-storey, red-brick structure is built around a trapezoidal plot and encloses a paved private central courtyard lined with palms.

It’s early evening when Monocle enters the courtyard, passing beneath the thick foliage of its trees. Despite its calm ambience, we have the sneaking sensation that we’re being watched. The quadrangle’s walls are speckled with windows, behind which 378 apartments can house about 2,000 residents. As if to confirm our suspicion, a resident pops her head out of a first-floor window to see who has wandered in. We exchange polite pleasantries and she explains, in a hushed voice, that the neighbours here guard the courtyard’s tranquillity closely. “Be careful,” she says. The brief exchange captures the pride and protectiveness of those who inhabit what is one of Valencia’s best-known addresses. Before disappearing back into her apartment, she drops a small publication down to us (we promise to deposit the book in her letterbox later). A quick flick through its pages, which are filled with tales of past residents, reveals that the courtyard was once a far livelier place.

When work began on the more than 15,000 sq m site on Valencia’s rural outskirts in 1929, architect Viedma Vidal envisaged its patio as a contemporary agora, energised by commerce, community interaction and cultural life. He hoped that daily interactions would foster a spirit of neighbourly solidarity. Despite these founding ambitions, the place has settled into a calmer, more private rhythm. As we speak to its residents, it becomes clear that this huge building, housing such a broad cross-section of people, holds up a mirror to the moment.

Finca Roja (meaning “Red Estate”) stands out for its bright, expressive brickwork. Many Valencianos know it by name. “More than its strong architectural character, I appreciate the way that it embodies a very clear idea of how to live,” says designer Francesc Rifé, who moved here with his wife, Eva Clérigues, in 2019. “The interior courtyard is the perfect example. It’s a peaceful space for residents, insulated from the city’s fast pace. Almost 100 years since it was created, it still makes perfect sense.” The couple tell Monocle that they were looking for a house that would “lower our heart rate”, while offering moments of community, quiet and calm in the chaos of the city. “There’s a sense of balance here,” says Clérigues. “It’s still mainly working class and the streets haven’t been overrun by chain shops. And we are within walking distance of the primary school, small parks and the train station.”

Finca Roja was finished during the progressive Second Spanish Republic and much has changed – in both the building and the neighbourhood – over the past century. Commissioned in response to Valencia’s rapid urban growth, the project began with a public tender from a social-welfare fund to provide housing for the workers of nearby factories. Its style married touches of neo-Mudéjar – a late-19th-century movement channelling medieval Iberia’s ornamental brick-and-tile architecture – with expressive rationalism inspired by Dutch architect Michel de Klerk, whose brick social-housing blocks were reshaping Amsterdam’s working-class districts.

Finca Roja’s ambitious scale, as well as its chamfered corners, make it a clear example of Catalan urbanist Ildefons Cerdà’s ensanche (“city expansion”) vision, which had already reshaped Barcelona. This often took the form of a grid of uniform blocks with planted courtyards at their centres that let light, air and traffic circulate.

With only open fields and factories nearby, Viedma Vidal layered Finca Roja with features promoting self-sufficiency and made room for a medical clinic, a bar, a consumer co-operative and a bakery.

There was a crèche and a shared cultural space too. The roof was adorned with eight ornate tiled turrets that still conceal giant water tanks.

But the building and its community have moved with the times, says architect and resident Pep Ruiz. “The context has changed because Spanish society has changed,” he adds, referencing the fact that, as the city grew and surrounded the standalone complex with housing and shops, Viedma Vidal’s model of self-sustaining commerce became redundant. Today this cultural shift has meant that many of these lower-floor shop spaces are occupied by quieter tenants. We spot signs for accountants’ offices and psychologists. “Somehow, the building has managed to stay relevant,” says Ruiz. “It’s always reflecting the current needs and wants of residents.”

For many of them, the priority is peace and quiet. “Valencia can be loud – often explosive,” says Ana Botella Espacio. She tells Monocle about Las Fallas, an annual, weeklong festival during which firecrackers are let off and towering sculptures are built before being burned. “Finding a peaceful enclave was fundamental, especially for my husband, Philipp Köpfli, who is Swiss,” she adds, with a laugh.

The couple spend most of their time near Zürich but Botella Espacio, a Valencia native, wanted their children to maintain a connection with their Spanish roots. Inside their interior-facing apartment, which was refurbished by fellow resident Francesc Rifé, the silence is so pronounced that it feels almost uncanny. “This might well be the most tranquil place in Valencia,” says Botella Espacio. “The past few years of global commotion have pushed us to focus on finding small strongholds of stillness. In Switzerland, we spend most of our time in the countryside. In Spain, our Finca Roja home is like an urban sanctuary.”

Early accounts of life in this housing complex describe a central garden overflowing with flowers oriented around an ornate stone fountain. Its sense of serenity was interrupted by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, when idealistic aspirations of community living made way for more urgent, utilitarian needs. During and just after the conflict, the complex was renamed Finca España; under Francisco Franco’s postwar fascist dictatorship, the veneration of anything red became a serious faux pas. In 1952 the central patio played host to its first falla – one of the giant papier-mâché monuments annually erected in Valencia to celebrate Saint Joseph – which was designed to reference the chalet-styled animal houses that then dotted Finca Roja’s garden, hosting ducks, chickens, rabbits and even a pet fox.

One barometer of how much things have changed is Finca Roja’s in-house club, La Colmena, in a ground-floor space that looks out onto the interior patio. Over the years it has hosted a football team, a chess club, meetings, conventions and evening drinks. Today it resembles a neighbourhood bar and is used mainly for watching televised sport.

To ensure that everything runs smoothly across the complex, a system of governance has evolved. Occupants clustered around each of the 14 stairwells elect their own president, with another rotating seat for a building-wide commissioner. When there are no willing candidates, a lottery system designates representatives. This led to recent property-buyer Moreno being elected president before he even moved in. His tenure coincided with Valencia’s catastrophic La Dana floods in 2024, which left the building unscathed but without proper pipe pressure for weeks. It was a crash course in collective problem-solving, with Moreno co-ordinating the installation of a temporary water pump in the patio.

“The meetings sometimes resemble an episode of Game of Thrones,” says Moreno. “Presidents are addressed by the number of their stairwell, rather than their names. Reaching consensus on anything is thorny.” As a result, changes happen slowly. An agreed hour for children’s playtime is still under discussion and a plan to rebuild the original fountain awaits a costing that everyone supports. Such caution has served the building well. In 1969 plans were tabled for a single-storey retail-and-hospitality block in the central patio, with an underground car park beneath. Neither got off – or under – the ground, which is why the picturesque garden survives today.

All of this adds to the building’s mystique. “Finca Roja is renowned in Valencia but many people don’t know exactly why,” journalist Isabel Blasco tells us. In 2022 she co-curated a retrospective exhibition with Laura Yerpes inside the latter’s interior-design studio on the ground floor. Part of Valencia Design Week, it was a popular showcase of works by artists and artisans who have called Finca Roja home. Tours were organised, allowing curious Valencianos to peek inside the private interior patio. “For many, this building is nearby but still far away,” says Blasco. “We wanted to demystify its past and present to remind the city that, more than being emblematic, it’s also part of our creative heart.” It’s a sentiment with which Yerpes agrees. “It’s more than a model for social housing,” she says. “It also evokes a certain esteem in Valencia. There’s an emotional connection.”

Juan Antonio Sánchez Santos (or Pichi) and Álvaro Hernández Santaeulalia (Avo) are an artist duo known as PichiAvo. The pair made an offer on their newly purchased Finca Roja apartment during their first viewing and are finalising plans to convert it into a combined studio and residence. “The building has a lot of personality – and personalities,” says Pichi, with a laugh. “All of them have many stories to tell.” Sensing a sea change as more younger residents move in, they suggest a revival of the recreational club’s cultural activities. However, both agree that taking a soft, rather than radical, approach is probably best. “Like everyone, we want to respect, cherish and protect the building,” says Avo.

When Monocle speaks to Ruiz, the conversation circles back to Finca Roja’s structure. “It is still advanced and functionally rational,” he says. “It means that there’s always potential for life to become more communal – if or when the community decides.” Indeed, during our time tiptoeing through Finca Roja’s corridors, another resident, who asks not to be named, explains that the building will continue to grow and change with its residents. “You can’t stop movement,” he says. “There will always be different ways of seeing things and this includes versions of the past and plans for the future. But life in Finca Roja goes on – change comes and goes – because the world always turns.”

While it might hold up a mirror to the moment and its community, Finca Roja continues to get the fundamentals right: a solid structure, sensible distribution of space and considered communal areas. The central patio still serves as a much-needed enclave of peace and pause for residents, while the inward-facing apartments benefit from ample natural light and generously verdant views. The community policing of renovations can cause headaches but this attitude also ensures that vestiges of the original vision, from the ornate fireplaces to the colourful floor tiles and the look of the window frames, are protected.

Viedma Vidal, it seems, understood that large-scale housing projects need to be more than functional. He dedicated time, effort and money to aesthetic details that conjure pride by giving residents a shared identity. Almost a century later, this resplendently red city block remains a fixture of Valencian architecture and communal living – and it looks set to continue to evolve with the needs of its community for many years to come.

In mid-2026, Konstantin Grcic presented a solo show at Berlin’s Deutsches Design Museum that few creatives would have had the means – or guts – to pull off. Streetwise was a display of early prototypes and models, abandoned projects and failed ideas, all drawn from the 61-year-old’s archives. “We make models to see all the defects of an idea,” says Grcic. The resulting show was a peek into the seldom-seen inner workings of a design studio.

Grcic has a three-decade track record of creating bestsellers, from office chairs and portable lamps to lipstick containers. Experiments with industrial processes and a predilection for angular forms in bright colours have helped define the 21st-century material world. In 2025, he founded his furniture label, 25kg. The same year, Grcic and a seven-strong team moved into a larger studio space in an industrial building in Schöneberg, which is where Monocle sat down with him.

Where do you keep your archives?
I had a space of 300 sq m on the outskirts of Berlin and it was full. We recently shrunk that storage by half, throwing away a lot and creating some kind of order. Our work is physical and designing a chair probably means that there are 10 or more full-scale iterations. It’s a difficult decision: do you keep all of them, some or none?

Is this what gave rise to ‘Streetwise’?
I knew that I would be going through all of this stuff and thought it was a good occasion to pick out some things. These pieces have value for me but maybe they also have some value for someone looking at them. The beauty is that they are the frozen moment of a creative process.

What was it like to revisit those archives?
I have been doing this for 30 years. The models show a very analogue process and it’s shocking to see how much we could do without all the tools that we have today. When I go through these old models, it shows me that the analogue process, the limitations, the focus and the time that we had were really good.

You started your studio in 1991. How long did it take to make a living from your design work?
It paid the bills from the start but those bills were small. My calculation was that I needed 1,500 deutschmarks a month. That’s something like €800. From that, I could pay my rent, a desk space, the phone bill, for food and materials. The struggle started once I had more clients and needed to produce more work more efficiently. I had an assistant and needed my own space. Suddenly, everything became really difficult. The turning point was a job for a kitchen-appliances company, which provided projects one after the other with a fixed fee. It was a big change. But there was a lot of what I never wanted to do: agency meetings with too many people involved, working for a market where there are 10 coffee machines on a shelf next to each other and the success of one model is that it’s cheaper than the others or it has more blinking lights. After four years, I said that I can’t do this any more. But it transformed the studio and I was free again.

What’s the ideal relationship with a manufacturer?
Italian companies really shaped who I became. The postwar Italian industry was always my role model: family-run businesses with a strong head who has an eye for finding designers to work with. These firms were interested in technology, in machinery. I love to work with industry. The studio can be quite a bubble and we could be happy doing stuff that we love but I need the outside world to push me somewhere that I wouldn’t normally go. That can be extremely creative.

Is the current crisis facing German manufacturing largely a design problem?
The design process starts way before you start giving form to something. It’s the analysis and briefing that make you start working on a car. That’s where the German industry went wrong. It was doing the same thing that it was very successful doing for so many years, and didn’t realise that something was starting to change fundamentally. German industry is not agile enough. But in moments of difficulty there is opportunity. The world today is a better world than ever – not to say that everything is perfect but it’s up to us to turn things around.

How did starting 25kg change things for you?
I never wanted to be a designer-producer. I always thought that was limiting. Projects that don’t make it into production, in most cases, I can understand why they don’t. One limitation that I see in the industry is in addressing very niche markets – it can’t do this because the scale of operation is different. But these niches are probably poking at something that we don’t realise yet.

Why do you make temporary public furniture?
Public space is wild and occupied by so many different people and interests. The furniture needs to withstand all of that. It caters to so many more people, rather than being a specific perfect solution. It’s a challenge for design to come to terms with. Seeing my pieces out in the world is nice because you understand how little control that you have over how they end up being used. Reality will never fulfil my ideal but it will surprise me in being better than I would ever have imagined.

I once called the Stirling Prize, the Royal Institute of British Architects’ award for the UK’s building of the year, “a moment for auto-erotic self-congratulation”. But last week’s winner changed my mind. It’s far worse: a sign that the industry has lost its last shred of imagination. Architectural excitement is tangential and prizes such as the Stirling, which are always a virtue-signalling exercise, are instead awarded to designs that judges want to tell the world are Good Things. Last year, it was housing for the elderly (Appleby Blue Almshouse). The year before that, it was public infrastructure (London’s Elizabeth Line).

Even on such terms, there is little substance. The new-ish Elizabeth Line – the most expensive completed public-infrastructure project in UK history – already looks battered because the architects chose a porous cladding material that is impossible to repair (TfL has been left to patch it up with faux-concrete-effect stickers). But judges are happy to overlook this dereliction of duty to the public purse to clean their conscience. This year the award went to Lion Green Road by Mary Duggan Architects with Ruff Architects. Judges lauded it for “addressing the pressing need for national housing”, ignoring that any new social housing, regardless of architectural merit, does this by definition.

Architects have long flattered themselves with the idea they might solve the housing crisis. Architectural history has a centuries’ worth pile of ideas, including modular construction, self-build systems and socially re-engineering the nuclear family. The winner’s contribution to this vast intellectual lineage is a “considered arrangement” of blocks cited for its “generous daylight”, “open views” and “connection to nature”.

You might notice that this sounds an awful lot like Le Corbusier’s “essential joys” of modernist urbanism: sun, space and greenery. The last time these were radical propositions was when they were formulated some 90 years ago but even the “sculpted”, angled facade of Lion Green Road is a less-than-coincidental echo of Frederick Gibberd’s The Lawn, the UK’s first residential tower completed in 1951. If this is really the best of the best, it is an admission that 21st-century architecture is stuck on rinse and repeat.

We can still rely on public opinion to pop the judges’ bubble. One punter’s response to this year’s award was, “Am I missing the point? How is this any different from any new beige housing in London?” The fact that the BBC has given up on televising the Stirling Prize due to bad ratings means that another opportunity for architecture to be at the forefront of public conversation has gone down the drain. The award going to Lion Green Road is another. But sure, Riba, keep telling me why I should be excited about brickwork in “three subtle shades of brown”.

When French business tycoon François Pinault earmarked Paris’s Île Seguin as the new home for his art collection in 2000, he offered a dose of much-needed optimism to the 11.5 hectares of desolate brownfield. Due west of the city, the site was where automobile manufacturer Renault’s flagship production facility once hummed. But when the project fell through in 2005, Pinault penned, with considerable anguish, an op-ed for Le Monde on how he had become disillusioned by bureaucratic setbacks.

Undeterred by his predecessor’s non-success, Laurent Dumas – a French collector armed with patience and significant property knowhow – decided to take on the site. The strip had been heavily polluted by decades of industrial activity and until 2009 was accessible only by two bridges (the municipality has since added three more). But as the CEO of property developer Emerige, Dumas is no stranger to the nuances of urban-regeneration projects – and this weekend, after more than 30 years since Renault’s departure, the doors finally opened on a new art institution anchoring this mini metropolis.

As Monocle exits the Metro in the Boulogne Billancourt suburb and traverses the Daydé bridge (the island is mainly pedestrianised, except for a bus service), an undulating structure of copper-coloured aluminium seems to unfurl from the river bank. Large is the first project in the French capital to be designed by Catalan firm RCR Arquitectes. It is a 5,000 sq m art centre that anchors the Pointe des Arts, the Île Seguin’s mixed-use development that also includes a cinema, hotel and food court. Downstream, a bulbous glass concert hall and recording studios are part of venue La Seine Musicale, which opened in 2017.

“The ambition is to make the Île Seguin the beating heart of Greater Paris,” says Large’s director, Paula Aisemberg. The former curator is sitting at her new desk, which appears to be almost floating; her perch overlooks the calm waters of the Seine. “We would like visitors to come here for a full day, even the whole weekend, hence we have included a hotel.” The island is currently served by Metro line 9, and a second link will be provided by line 15 from Spring 2027.

Louis Renault originally bought the site in 1919. (Prior to the industrialist’s purchase, the island was farmland, then a commercial laundry and tannery.) Though the plant that he built quickly became the largest of its kind in the country, automotive heft wasn’t the only thing that it was known for. The company began accumulating contemporary artworks in the 1930s, and by the late 1960s, it had become a driving force that connected two worlds by giving a string of artists access to surplus materials and the factory’s machinery; Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, Venezuelan artist and sculptor Jesús Rafael Soto and American painter Robert Rauschenberg were among the creatives who benefitted from the scheme.

The Renault production plant became an exhibition space, which displayed works including a chromatic mural by Argentine-born artist Julio Le Parc in its café and Hungarian-born French painter Simon Hantaï’s screen-printed Formica panels in the restaurant. “The factory became a creative laboratory,” says Aisemberg. It’s evident that the thread between the manufacturing plant, which was demolished in 2004, and the new facilities is more than just geographical.

“We felt compelled to eulogise this automotive history,” adds Aisemberg. The gallery’s first exhibition, Moteur Imaginaire (The Imaginary Engine), is devoted to the carmaker’s own collection, featuring more than 50 pieces borrowed from the Renault Fund for Art and Culture and 17 new commissions put together by New York-based Italian curator Cecilia Alemani.

On the ground floor is that same work by Le Parc, which features a gradient of colours that seem to sweep past as though in motion. There are also pieces by Jean Tinguely and French painter Jean Dubuffet. The latter’s large-scale sculpture, “Le Mur Bleu”, was created from the factory’s epoxy-resin stocks, while Tinguely’s “Pit Stop” sculpture is constructed with parts from Renault’s RE40 Formula 1 race car. “We hope that engineers who once worked here will come back and see what we’ve created,” says Aisemberg.

And so a new era has begun for the Île Seguin. But Pinault’s influence isn’t entirely invisible. For the inauguration, he loaned the island a sculpture by British artist Thomas Houseago titled “L’homme Pressé” (“The Man in a Hurry”) from his personal collection. Almost eight metres tall, the bronze-hewn figure appears to be striding forwards resolutely. It feels like a cathartic statement for a collector who recognised the potential in this place 26 years ago. If only he’d have been prepared to wait.
large-emerige.fr

“The government of Iraq was the first to show a practical interest [in my ideas],” wrote Le Corbusier in 1960. Walking along the car-choked streets of eastern Baghdad, Monocle passes hookah cafés and dukans (compact convenience shops) before encountering the soaring, curvilinear roof of the Swiss-French architect’s Baghdad Gymnasium. It’s a building that recalls a bygone age of design ambition in the Iraqi capital. The modernist was invited here by King Faisal II as the city was preparing a bid to host the 1960 Olympic Games. The UK-backed Hashemite regent had established the Iraqi Development Board as part of a nation-building programme and was using revenue from the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company to bring the best architects from across the globe to the country. Over the course of several decades – and despite revolutions – the programme enlisted Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, Gio Ponti and Josep Lluís Sert, alongside Le Corbusier. The goal was to make Baghdad the envy of the world.

“Baghdad belonged to the Ottoman Empire for centuries but the city didn’t really have a specific architecture,” says academic Pedro Azara Nicolás, who has extensively studied Baghdad’s modernist masters (his exhibition, City of Mirages: Baghdad 1952-1982, toured cities including Barcelona, Madrid, Boston and Baghdad between 2008 and 2023). “Ottoman architecture wasn’t necessarily suited to Iraq’s geographical and climatic conditions. King Faisal II decided to transform Baghdad into a major Western-style capital to distinguish it from other Arab cities that were looking to the Soviet Union for inspiration.”

To distance his country from Soviet aesthetics, the regent developed plans for a capital with an opera house, new universities and museums, as well as public, cultural and political institutions. Faisal II was the third ruler of the independent Arab state that is now modern-day Iraq, a nation formed after a revolt against the Ottomans in the provinces of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul. He was continuing a legacy established by his grandfather, Faisal I, who had devoted the early years of his reign to building roads and oil pipelines in order to finance development projects.

Faisal II had toured the world following the Second World War and, working with architects and engineers led by Nizar Jawdat – the Harvard-educated son of Ali Jawdat al-Ayyubi, Iraq’s former prime minister and ambassador to Washington from 1942 to 1947 – the king was committed to reinventing the nation’s capital at pace, project by project. Chief among these was Le Corbusier’s Gymnasium and plans for a 50,000-seat stadium complex, including a swimming pool with stands holding 5,000 seats and open-air amphitheatre. The Swiss-French architect would explore themes also seen in his design for Stade Firminy near Saint-Étienne, a lightly curved athletics grandstand built in a former sandstone quarry.

Around the same time, Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus movement, was reimagining an institute of higher learning in Baghdad. The German architect had first visited the city in 1954 on his way home from Japan. A First World War hero, he had gone into exile following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, heading first to London and eventually arriving at Harvard University, where he joined some of the most important architects of the 20th century, pushing for social reform. One of his students there was Jawdat, who lobbied his politically influential family to bring Gropius to Iraq. This set of experiences enabled his firm, The Architects Collaborative, to secure prime position when it came to designing the Baghdad University campus.

“It’s hard to imagine now but Baghdad during the 1950s was a hub of modern arts and literary movements,” says Ali Shakir, an Iraqi-born architect who has written extensively on the country’s architectural past. “Young Iraqi alumni of prestigious European and US universities returned to their country of origin pulsing with potential and new ideas that they aspired to marry with their rich heritage.” Jawdat and his American-born wife, Ellen, were part of this cultural movement in which the educated diaspora returned to the fledgling modern nation.

The work on the campus was carried out with an understanding that the project was as much about good architecture as it was about providing a space to train a generation of Iraqi architects and engineers, so the country would no longer need to import Western expertise for every project. “We felt as though a large window had opened with such a wealth of new ideas, wise advice and calm optimism that we had to find some way of continuing the experience,” wrote Ellen at the time.

With the Iraqi Development Board’s blessing, Gropius and his advisers chose a piece of land in the southern part of Baghdad surrounded on three sides by the Tigris. The team believed that this site would remain secluded and unaffected by the city’s development. By 1959, Gropius and his office had a workable design of 273 buildings on 200 hectares encompassing three academic faculties: sciences, letters and humanities. Among the buildings that Gropius prioritised were those for architecture and engineering, as well as athletic and recreational facilities, an infirmary, student dormitories and staff housing, all surrounded by a ring road.

Outside this core campus, clusters of date-palm groves, open areas and artificial topography offsetting the otherwise flat terrain helped to counteract the excessive heat from May to September, with daily highs regularly climbing above 40C. Gropius’s design positioned the buildings close enough to overshadow one another, cooling the architecture. The shade and proximity also provided students with a sense of closeness and connection, regardless of the discipline that they were studying.

But the region was changing fast. Pan-Arab nationalism, fuelled in part by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and resentment of the pro-UK monarchy’s Baghdad Pact alliance, was sweeping Iraq and Faisal II was assassinated in July 1958, marking the end of the Hashemite monarchy in the country. Led by Abdul Karim Kassem, a socialist son of a carpenter from Baghdad, the new regime reassured Gropius’s team that they wanted the project finished, though Kassem had his own ideas about it. The general wanted to add a small skyscraper to the campus plan that could be seen from his office in the defence ministry. The result was the 20-storey Faculty Office Tower, alongside Gropius’s symbolic, 25-metre-high entrance arch known as the Open Mind.

The construction of Le Corbusier’s athletics venues also continued. The sheer number of projects in which he was involved caused the process to drag. By the time the Gymnasium was completed in 1980 (23 years after the project commenced and 15 years since its architect’s death), Saddam Hussein had ascended to the presidency. He named the Le Corbusier Gymnasium complex after himself. The accompanying Al Sha’ab stadium that the architect had planned was never built. Instead, next to it, a 35,700-seat design by Portuguese architect Francisco Keil do Amaral went up in 1966.

It was in the shadow of these projects that Iraq’s own modernist master would emerge. Rifat Chadirji trained at the Hammersmith School of Arts and Crafts in London, returning in 1952 to Iraq, where he absorbed Gropius and Le Corbusier’s ideas by watching their Baghdad projects rise around him. Born into an influential Baghdad family, he opened his own architecture practice, Iraq Consult, with the aim of putting a regional spin on the international templates sweeping the globe in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

Chadirji’s first major commission came in 1959, when he was 33 years old. He was asked to create the Unknown Soldier Monument in Baghdad. A modernist statue modelled on the ancient Arch of Ctesiphon, it celebrated the wars of independence fought against the British monarchy. Chadirji soon hit a streak, creating the platform for Tahrir Square’s Freedom Monument, also in 1959; the Iraqi Scientific Academy in 1965; the Tobacco Monopoly Company building in 1966; the School for Veterinary Medicine in 1967; and the Central Post Telegraph and Telephone Administration offices in 1975. He also designed several homes for wealthy, ruling Ba’ath party members and supporters, including the Mahmoud Othman Residence. This project cemented the young brutalist’s style: it featured yellow brick for arched windows and wooden shutters in the traditional manner of old Iraqi markets. “From the very outset of my practice, I thought it imperative that, sooner or later, Iraq create for itself an architecture that is regional in character,” he wrote. “Yet, simultaneously, it needed to be modern, part of the current international avant garde style.” By 1978, at the pinnacle of his career at Iraq Consult, Chadirji was the country’s most renowned contemporary architect.

That year, however, Chadirji was sent to Abu Ghraib prison after refusing president Ahmed Hassan Al-Bakr’s request to use his international office for intelligence-gathering purposes (Iraq Consult had an additional studio in Bahrain). Al-Bakr had led Iraq since 1968 before his vice-president, Saddam, overthrew him in July 1979. The latter granted Chadirji freedom shortly after taking office but demanded that the architect lead Baghdad’s beautification plan – a brief, cosmetic yet deliberate echo of the Hashemites’ architectural courtship of the West decades earlier. It was a forced commission that led to the next great period of construction in the Iraqi capital.

“Saddam came to power and he wanted to prepare Baghdad for the conference of non-aligned countries that was to happen in 1982,” Chadirji recounted to the press years later. “He wanted somebody to replan the city and he was told that I was the one who could do it. A car took me to the palace, still in my prison clothes, and a secretary of the Revolutionary Council said, ‘The president wants to immortalise your name in history.’ So, I said, ‘Thank you very much.’”

With unlimited resources, Chadirji brought in design consultants from across the globe, including Robert Venturi from the US and Richard England from Malta. The team built pedestrian bridges and carried out planning for a cultural construction programme, which included new theatres. Tensions, however, eventually arose. The memory of his 20 months in prison became the catalyst for the architect to flee Iraq in 1983. A resentful Saddam subsequently tore down Chadirji’s Unknown Soldier Monument and replaced it with an enormous statue of himself. Chadirji considered returning on one occasion: in 2009, when the US invited him to reconstruct his Unknown Soldier Monument, following the overthrow of Saddam. This never materialised but it prompted him to share his thoughts on the city with the architectural media.

“I cannot believe what has happened to the buildings in Baghdad; everything has been almost completely destroyed,” said Chadirji. “The proper rebuilding is only half of the project; the other half, which is more important, is to keep it and take care of it, because it is part of the memory of the people and the society.” That challenge of keeping and taking care of these architectural memory banks has been put to the test continually. Chadirji’s Central Post Office withstood the Iran-Iraq War (1980 to 1988), the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 US invasion, though postwar crews did rebuild and reinforce parts of its foyer. Similarly, Le Corbusier’s Gymnasium has, over the years, undergone a conversion from a 3,500-seat indoor arena – part of a wider athletics complex also including a stadium – to a US army barracks used during the occupation from 2003 to 2005. The arch and other prominent features of the university survived the invasion too and young students still gather underneath it to this day, reviewing notes, gossiping and waiting for a ride home. It’s an appropriate reflection of Gropius’s ambition, disseminating architectural modernism in the Middle East and inspiring many designers.

The future of much of this legacy, however, hangs in the balance. Recent conflicts have left many buildings destroyed or in a state of disrepair, including Chadirji’s Tobacco Monopoly Company, where the US-led forces undid the progress of dynasties and dictators. It is damage that hasn’t been helped by shifts in attitudes, as Baghdadis now look to the rapid development elsewhere in the Gulf for city-making benchmarks. “The United Arab Emirates is fascinating for young Iraqis and therefore young architects,” says Azara Nicolás. “That country projects an image of luxury, splendour, novelty and modernity that Iraq doesn’t have. Architects are holding conferences to try to save heritage but developers – and many residents as well – prefer to build a new city that resembles those in the Emirates.”

Glimmers of hope do exist. The governments of former president Abdul Latif Rashid and incumbent Nizar Amidi have been aware of the need for, well… something. There is a construction boom in Baghdad (Zaha Hadid’s Central Bank of Iraq is due for completion this year) and the executive office has tried to maintain some standards, overseeing the removal of hastily placed Chinese-made panels from some “new and gleaming” buildings due to the urban heat-island effect they have exacerbated. A few main streets have also been given a facelift and young people can again be seen sitting outside the 1979 National Theatre (constructed during Saddam’s building boom), discussing politics, business and the state of Iraqi society. In recent years, Le Corbusier’s Gymnasium has also been repaired, with his namesake foundation contributing to the renovation by adding hanging ceilings, traditional Iraqi coloured glass and multicoloured seats, as well as marble to replace outdated metal parts. Two international football matches have been held at the adjacent stadium. It’s a demonstration that Baghdad remains an avant garde architectural capital, albeit a dusty one.

This month, the Monocle team touched down at Livex Abu Dhabi – the UAE’s inaugural Liveability and Investment Exhibition – to talk about initiatives close to our heart: making cities more liveable and joyful, and home to a better quality of life. 

Ryan Reynolds – who was named chief island officer of Yas Island, Abu Dhabi, in 2024 – was on stage in conversation with Monocle’s editorial director and chairman, Tyler Brûlé. Reynolds drew on his experiences across acting, business, branding and building a sense of place. The pair considered what makes communities thrive beyond good weather or a beautiful landscape. A liveable city, they believe, doesn’t necessarily translate to living in a paradise – but to somewhere with a sense of identity and pride. 

Bang Rak was once the gateway to Thailand, with foreign ships checking in at its main trading building, Customs House, on the eastern bank of the Chao Phraya River. Foreigners arrive elsewhere these days and many expats now live in modern high-rises along Sukhumvit Road. But a new generation of Thai makers is moving in and turning this district into a creative quarter. Join Monocle for a wander around the neighbourhood and a chat with some of Bang Rak’s recent arrivals.

Where to stay

While there are plenty of luxury hotels on the riverfront to choose from, we’re pointing you to Beanstalk Bangkok on Surawong Road. The building formerly housed the New Fuji Hotel, which catered to American soldiers on break from their posts in Vietnam. Make sure to check out the small brass plaque on the discrete façade. The property reopened a few years ago as a 57-room boutique accommodation that channels Bang Rak’s Thai-Chinese heritage.

A Chinese shrine to the goddess of the sea is nearby on Charoen Krung Soi 39 while faded red lanterns leftover from the last celebration still hang over side streets. The myriad silversmiths, jewellers and diamond shops that were historically run by Thai-Chinese traders add a faded sparkle. Graffitied metal shutters, in new and old styles, guard shophouses with names in three languages. In English: House of Gems, Heritage Gems and Gem Plaza. But my favourite is Gem Gems.

Breakfast

To beat the heat, we rise early for breakfast and start our day on foot by walking east to the Neilson Hays Library, one of the pillars of Bang Rak. Housed in a neoclassical building, the privately funded English-language library dates to the 19th century. Bangkok coffee chain FIX took over the pleasant courtyard café in April last year and offers eggs on sourdough and fruity yoghurt bowls under the shade of tropical palm trees. 

Neilson Hays backs onto The British Club, another Victorian leftover, which has the best swimming pool in the area. But this is not a Lawrence Osbourne novel and we have a packed itinerary of interesting Thais to meet. Next stop: Si Phraya Road via Naret Road.

Galleries and shopping

The beginnings of Bang Rak’s latest reinvention can be traced to 2025. That’s when gallerist Sutima Sucharitakul relocated her well-regarded independent gallery, Nova Contemporary, to the district. Sucharitakul has built a reputation for representing Thailand’s rising stars, such as Latthapon Korkiatarkul, Vacharanont Sinvaravatn and Prae Pupityastaporn.

Sucharitakul is not the only entrepreneur elevating Si Phraya Road. Three doors down is Glamma Vintage where the owner collects haute couture; this shop-museum is an Aladdin’s cave for anyone working in fashion. Ring ahead of visiting to see if it’s open (by appointment is commonplace here and few places are open on Mondays).

Around the same time that Nova moved to the neighbourhood, Bangkok-based fashion brand Philip Huang relocated to the other end of Si Phraya Road. In a building called Prachoom Chang – which translates to “the meeting of makers” – Philip Huang took over the former office and printing press of Daily News, one of Thailand’s most popular news outlets. The label transformed the space into a flagship shop, office and natural dyeing workshop, which features vats created by the country’s biggest contemporary artist, Pinaree Sanpitak. Also in the building is the Thai creative Channatip Chanvipava and Ivan Pun’s Burmese furniture brand, Paribawga. Gathering like-minded friends together to take over a large space seems to be somewhat of a trend in Bang Rak. 

Lunch

Now that we’ve explored Prachoom Chang, we’ll get a bite at Samlor (lunch is only served on weekends) on the corner of Charoen Krung, Bangkok’s first paved road. Samlor’s elevated take on Thai street food is hinted at by the metal three-wheeled rickshaw hanging above the entrance. Our dinner menu will have plenty of meat, so for lunch, try the catch of the day, which often comes from the warm waters off the country’s southern coast. If you’re visiting during the week, head along Charoen Krung to Kick! Chop! Slice!. This pizza joint adds a Thai flavour to its New York-style doughs by using local ingredients, such as Isan sausage.

With our stomachs full, we’ll take a short stroll around the corner to Kitt Ta Khon. The craft studio opened its first shop in 2024 to showcase its handwoven furniture pieces: armchairs, benches and other creations wrapped in colourful beads, rope and string. The Sukpha stools can be customised on the second floor and bubbled wrapped for the flight back home. Carry-on only? There are plenty of bamboo fans, reed table mats and small ceramics on the shelves too.

Kitt Ta Khon is a few steps away from the mighty Chao Phraya River, which has been enjoying its own renaissance this century. The opening of Capella and Four Seasons in 2020 pulled visitors back to Bangkok’s main waterway, which has been helmed for 150 years by the peerless Mandarin Oriental. This momentum shows no sign of letting up with a handful of major openings coming soon. The former Customs House is set to reopen as a 75-key luxury hotel under The Langham’s banner; the result of an elaborate engineering project to elevate the subsided heritage building by one storey. Nearly all of the focus, from the rooms to the restaurants, is on the river view. The yet-unnamed bar with its own pier shows promise for future cocktails in 2027 but, for now, it’s time for an after lunch pick-me-up. We’re are eyeing a perch further inland.

Coffee

From the main Charoen Krung Road, follow the route of Charoen Krung Alley 43 in the direction of Surawong Road as it snakes through the backstreet garages, launderettes and shophouses of this residential neighbourhood. Cross over to Decho Road and order a coffee (anything from the menu with ice) at Monochrome. 

Decho Road is another Bang Rak street on the rise. The end of last year saw two sets of friends from fashion and film take over the former House of Chao antique shop. Fashion brand Nong Rak has taken the ground floor for its first shop, selling limited-edition creations from Bangkok-made silk alongside vintage clothing. The upper floor of the building has been transformed into Sala Saneha, a cinema, wine bar and lounge. There are several screenings each night ranging from Thai films to US indies and European releases. Book a ticket for the late show and come back after dinner down the street. 

Dinner

Aunglo by Yangrak is a casual restaurant serving Thai classics cooked on a grill. It moved to a larger spot on the corner of Si Lom Road last year and its barbecue pork ribs are a must try. Room for dessert? Order the Khanom Krok Brûle for a contemporary twist on the traditional coconut pudding.

This part of Bang Rak is set to get a major boost in a few years’ time when the new Hatai development removes its hoardings. The Thomas Heatherwick-designed mixed-use project is currently under construction on the site of the original Narai Hotel – a legendary 1960s institution with 500 rooms and a revolving restaurant that was once a celebrity hangout and the tallest building on Si Lom Road. Hatai, currently set to open in late 2027, will include Bangkok’s first Six Senses hotel and the redesigned Narai Hotel. Until then, order a glass of wine at Sala Saneha, find a snug seat and settle in for some well-curated cinema. We’ll end our day back at the Beanstalk.

The morning after the first round of the Brazilian elections, held on 4 October, much of the country awoke in a state of disbelief. At first dazed and then outraged, liberals and left-wingers digested the scale of the right and far-right parties’ success. Conservatives, meanwhile, were in awe, so unprecedented and unexpected was the magnitude of their achievement.

In congressional and gubernatorial races across the country, right-wing candidates chalked up resounding victories, paving the way for an utterly transformed political landscape when the winners take office early next year. But it was the presidential race that truly confounded observers. Despite trailing behind in most opinion polls for the entire campaign, Flávio Bolsonaro – the eldest son of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro – took an almost two-point lead over the incumbent leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, setting up a run-off between the two men this Sunday

The impact was immediate. Markets rallied on the expectation of a return to right-wing governance; meanwhile, previously hedging politicians and some Supreme Court judges quickly moved to Bolsonaro’s camp. For Lula, now 80 years old and serving his third non-consecutive term, it looked as though the game was up.

Then the fightback began. In the weeks since the first-round results, the political left has been galvanised. With a sense of urgency not seen earlier in the campaign, hundreds of thousands of Lula supporters rallied at events in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere. Volunteers, both young and old, have been campaigning on the streets. Lula stickers are suddenly everywhere. On social media – a key battlefield – Lula’s Partido dos Trabalhadores has belatedly begun to get its act together, pushing the octogenarian president to produce the kind of selfie videos that have long been an effective tool of the Brazilian right.

The new style of campaigning has been complemented by some hurried political manoeuvring. On 15 October – just in time for the run-off and following much persuasion by Lula – Congress abolished the six-day working week for millions of formal workers in sectors such as retail and services. They will soon be entitled to two days off per week with no reduction in wages. Lula has also promised new cash-handout programmes and free public transport at weekends.

The incumbent’s efforts are having an effect. Opinion polls show the gap between the contenders narrowing, with the two men now in a technical tie. Bolsonaro, meanwhile, seems to recognise that the race is not yet run and has stepped up his public appearances and media engagements in the final stretch. It’s likely, however, that the latter – who markets himself as a “vaccinated” version of his more radical father – is the more confident. After all, polling has consistently underestimated his support and, in the modern era, no Brazilian presidential candidate who has led the first round has gone on to lose the run-off.

Lula, meanwhile, suffers from broad anti-incumbency sentiment, with voters clearly looking for something different amid widespread concerns about the cost of living and crime. The left-wing leader has been a fixture of Brazilian politics for almost half a century. On Sunday, voters will decide whether that is long enough.

Beirut certainly wasn’t built in a day but it has repeatedly come close to being undone in one. I first visited the Lebanese capital just before the October protests in 2019, which marked the beginning of a series of crises. The port blast of August 2020 delivered unprecedented devastation, leaving an open wound and a mark on the city’s collective memory. Today a war rages on its southern border. You can’t write about Lebanon without encountering politics and conflict but what is fascinating about Beirut is that it doesn’t hide its scars – they are folded into daily life and the city’s design scene. The city recently hosted the third edition of Interiors Lebanon and the 27th edition of Project Lebanon, a fair about construction.

While these fairs might offer a moment to come together, the resilience of the city’s architecture and design community is also baked into its built works. Take Lina Ghotmeh’s Stone Garden, a 13-storey residential and cultural tower in Beirut. Its deep, irregular openings deliberately echo bullet-pocked façades and serve as planted balconies, inviting nature in and giving the building a sense of life rising from memory. The Beit Beirut museum’s façade tells a similar story: it still bears the bullet holes and shell damage of the Civil War, preserved rather than renovated to keep memory alive. And then there are the grain silos at the port, which were gutted by the blast in 2020. Their fate is still uncertain but citizens are determined that they endure as landmarks to carry the memory forward.

Movement has always shaped the harbour city too, from its origins as a centre of trade to the waves of upheaval that followed the destruction. For those who were fortunate enough to escape, it was never about turning their backs on home. Instead they sought safe harbours abroad to support those who stayed behind. This has created a vast diaspora who carry an unwavering love for the cedar flag and a backpack full of hope for their country. Their return has made Beirut a vibrant melting pot of cultures, histories and ideas, leaving a lasting international imprint on its architectural landscape.

When I returned this summer with my Lebanese partner, I found a place that is far from frozen by grief, still alive with the very rhythm that first struck me. Shops, restaurants and hotels, such as the iconic Albergo, have weathered the storm and been meticulously restored. Around them, new spots have sprung up, buzzing with inventive energy and a refusal to stand still. The perseverance of the city’s recent design fairs is a reminder that in a world with too many fractured places and conflicts, scars are not endings but foundations for renewal, proof that a brighter future can emerge even from devastation. They create a reason to keep looking ahead.

Rebuilding Beirut: Read how Lebanon’s architects and designers followed the devastating port explosion by building better.