Daniel Libeskind's Secret Museum of the Kurds

​The architect of the World Trade Center master plan reveals his design for a museum in northern Iraq.

- Elizabeth Greenspan

Seven years ago an intermediary for the prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan, Nechirvan Barzani, asked the architect Daniel Libeskind to design a museum. It was to be built in the autonomous region’s capital city, Erbil, in the northern part of Iraq, and it would be the first, Barzani told him through the intermediary, to tell the story of his people, an ethnic minority that’s survived decades of violence and oppression. The prime minister imagined an institution that would confront past horrors—in particular, Saddam Hussein’s genocidal attack on the Kurds in the late 1980s, which Kurds call the Anfal—as well as celebrate Kurdish culture. And it would cement Erbil’s status as a world-class tourist destination. 

At the time, in 2009, this seemed achievable. Parts of Iraq were still in turmoil, but Erbil was attracting foreign investment and building shopping malls and hotels. The city’s governor took to calling it the new Dubai. Even in relatively peaceful times, though, a museum dedicated to Kurdish identity is a sensitive proposition. The Kurds, most of whom are Muslim, do not have their own country. They live in a region that crosses the borders of Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey, and they’ve often been persecuted in all four. So Barzani’s representative made an extraordinary request: He asked Libeskind to keep the project a secret. The architect agreed, and over the years he’s limited word of the project to senior staff, who were instructed not to discuss it. When media or clients came through his New York studio, staff scooped up the project’s designs and stowed them away in drawers and cupboards until the visitors had left.