"Of all of contemporary architecture's many sins, perhaps the most pernicious is its continued participation in the follies and fantasies of various undemocratic states. While many architects withdrew from projects in Russia after it began its war of attrition against Ukraine, they have yet to apply such ethical scruples to the Gulf petro-states, each of which has invested trillions upon trillions of dollars in high-profile building projects."
"Unsurprisingly, when Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman proposed building a 110-mile horizontal urban "skyscraper" called the Line near the border of Jordan and Egypt in 2020-the centerpiece of a vast new planned city called Neom-many of the world's most prestigious firms clamored to sign up. These ranged from the usual suspects of neoliberal future-making, like Thom Mayne's aesthetically erratic outfit Morphosis, to firms that inherited the city-building impulses of modernism, such as Peter Cook and an I.M. Pei-less Pei Cobb Freed."
Prestigious architectural firms have continued to take commissions from Gulf petro-states despite those governments' documented crimes, environmental destruction, forced displacements, use of slave labor, and assassination of journalists. Many architects withdrew from Russian projects after its war in Ukraine, yet the same ethical scruples were not applied to Gulf commissions. The Gulf's trillions in spending, lax regulations, and appetite for spectacular projects have attracted star architects to schemes such as Neom and the 110-mile Line. Major contractors like AECOM have overseen these programs, linking global firms to politically fraught, resource-intensive megaprojects.
Read at The Nation
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