Born in 1915, Jafar Allawi was granted a governmental scholarship to study architecture in the University of Liverpool in 1933. Allawi graduated on the same day as
Medhat Ali Madhloom in 1939. Upon returning to Iraq, Allawi was appointed as a representative architect in the ministry of Education where he designed several schools and governmental buildings. He stayed as a consultant for school buildings till 1954. Allawi later opened his own consultancy firm which was the first ever Iraqi Consultancy Firm, and it operated for six decades.
Some of Allawi’s buildings are considered millstones for Iraq’s modern heritage such as the
Jaafariya Secondary School (1946), Sami Saad Al-Din Building in Baghdad (1949), the Agricultural Bank Building in collaboration with Abdallah Ihsan Kamel (1949-1951),
Al Hariri Highschool (1953), and several others.
In 1965, he was appointed as a minister for Public Works. Allawi was also called upon frequently as a juror for several national architecture competitions.
Bibliography:
Dr. Khaled al-Sultany,
Study on Representations of Architectural modernity in Iraq, Amman: Adib Books, 2021, p.165.