Duraid Al Yawir is recorded as an Iraqi student enrolled on the 1963-64 postgraduate course run by the Architectural Association’s (AA) Department of Tropical Studies, in London. Details regarding his early upbringing are not yet known to us but it is documented that he studied architecture at the Royal West of England Academy School of Architecture, Bristol, UK prior to his acceptance on the AA course. Following completion of his AA studies in February 1964, Al Yawir appears to have returned to Iraq and in 1965 is recorded as part of a consortium which won the 1965 competition to redesign al-Tahrir Square, Baghdad. The other members of the design team included Al Yawir’s fellow AA Tropical Studies alumni (from 1962-63) Besim Hakim, alongside Bristol architects and AA alumni, Norman Whicheloe and Stephen Macfarlane. Al Yawir’s subsequent career is not clear to us but he may have returned to the UK, as a Duraid Al Yawey is recorded as having submitted a Ph.D. thesis on regional planning in Iraq to the Department of Town and Country Planning at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, in 1974. If these are one and the same person, then Al Yawir appears to have remained in academia, contributing books, articles and chapters on urban planning, through the 1970s and 1980s. 

Sources 

• Architectural Association Council Minutes, 16th March, 1964. AA Archives
• Architectural Association Student Register 1945-1972. AA Archives
• ‘Baghdad, Ancient City: New Face. Iraqi-British Consortium Plan To Reconstruct Tahir Square’, Bulletin of the Republic of Iraq, September / October, 1965, Vol. VI, No. 4, p
• Yawer, D. ‘Social and Economic Influences on Ishaqi Regional Planning in Iraq’, Ph.D. thesis, Heriot-Watt University, 1974.
• Yawer, D., ‘Rural Industrialization for Developing Countries’. Chetana Publications, 1978.
• Yawer, D., ‘Social and Economic Influences on Planning in Developing Countries’. Chetana Publications, 1979.
• Duraid Al Yawey, 'Urbans Spaces in the Islamic City…' in ‘The Arab City, Its Character and Islamic Cultural Heritage. Proceedings of a Symposium Held in Medina… 1981’, eds: Ismail Serageldin, Richard R. Herbert, Samir El-Sadek, Serageldin, 1982