The Line, a Saudi Megaproject, Is Dead [View all]

[Celerity]

It was always doomed to unravel, but the firms who lent their name to this folly should be held accountable.

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/the-line-neom-saudi-vision-2030/

https://archive.ph/UjPtd


A migrant worker at a Riyadh construction site. (Jaap Arriens / Getty)

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.

The governments of these countries are guilty of a range of crimes, from unfettered carbon emissions and forced displacements to the use of slave labor and the assassination of journalists. Yet this has not deterred starchitects and their firms from signing their names to various marinas, towers, and shopping plazas. Grand and ambitious architectural projects have largely stalled in the West, but the Gulf states’ lack of regulations and endless flows of cash provide the kind of laissez-faire sandbox that most architects—especially those of the technocratic “big ideas” variety—can only dream of.

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. All of this, of course, was managed by the notorious architecture-and-construction-slash-defense-contractor AECOM, which also happens to be handling the structural logistics for Donald Trump’s ballroom and Benjamin Netanyahu’s sinister, Neom-esque Gaza 2035 master plan.

For nearly five years, we beleaguered souls in the design world have had to endure innumerable press releases and puff pieces about whatever zany shit was going on out in the Saudi Arabian desert. This included the Line’s supposed sustainability efforts (oh, the oil-funded irony), such as indoor gardens and wind farms, plus a number of gravity-defying proposals that, to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of physics, sounded more like pulpy sci-fi gags (most notoriously, an upside-down skyscraper poised like a keystone over an artificial marina full of stagnant water). Year by year, with little progress made save for the piles prematurely driven into the sand, it became increasingly clear that the damn thing would never be built—that it was what we in the biz call “paper architecture.”

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