Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.Welcome to the “land of the future”, where the buildings look like they have been designed by artificial intelligence on acid: the product of algorithms uncoupled from the mundane constraints of practicality, price and place. A state-of-the-art yachting town being constructed on the Gulf of Aqaba could easily have been modelled on the mythical realm of Wakanda from the Marvel blockbuster,.
To describe these schemes as a “Mecca” for the world’s leading architects feels, given their location, especially apt. Bjarke Ingels, the ubiquitous Danish “starchitect”, is designing the Oxagon, a reimagined industrial port city touted as “the world’s largest floating structure”. Dominating the Trojena ski resort will be a 330-metre skyscraper by Zaha Hadid Architects .
“The story of the women is a symbol of how things are changing. There are big things happening. It is one of the major areas of change. That’s going to be a good thing, and contribute to a much more open place.” Still, of the 20 executive positions listed on the NEOM website, only two are occupied by women.
This avid gaming fan, who tends to sleep late in the morning to be in sync with American time zones, also courted the princes of Silicon Valley, such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. More unexpected has been his bromance with the movie star, Johnny Depp, whom MBS let use his personal 747 jumbo jet, and entertained aboard his 130-metre super yacht, Serene, the flagship of his personal armada .
However, the kingdom’s human rights record is still appalling. “Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy restricts almost all political rights and civil liberties,” the democracy watchdog Freedom House noted in its 2023 report. “The regime relies on pervasive surveillance, the criminalisation of dissent, appeals to sectarianism and ethnicity, and public spending supported by oil revenues to maintain power.
Over dinner in Sydney recently, Professor Barber listened to an Australian involved in one of the projects wax lyrical about the joys of working with so few normal constraints. “I said, ‘Come and talk to my 18- and 19-year-old students, and let them listen to a mature architect talk so dismissively about the environmental externalities forced on our children.’ It’s appalling, frankly.
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