Bluesky

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.”

This was recently confirmed in a long Financial Times exposé detailing how the scope of bin Salman’s vision has shrunk to basically nothing. The “chandelier” (the central upside-down skyscraper) was derailed by the fact that the earth spins, the wind blows, and human waste can’t be flushed upward. The Line’s reflective surface and wind-turbine farm basically created a bird-slaughtering machine along one of the world’s most important migratory routes. Meanwhile, amid a culture of secrecy and retribution, architects and planners were basically forced to agree with whatever bin Salman thought was interesting or worthwhile, a process that mostly relied on a nonstop parade of spectacular renderings.

Unlike other paper reveries, the human costs of the Line have been staggering. In 2021, the development occasioned a horrific program of forced displacement for members of the Huwaitat tribe and the imprisonment—even execution—of anyone who dared to resist. A few years later, an ITV documentary revealed that more than 21,000 workers were estimated to have died or disappeared under Saudi Vision 2030, the massive urbanization program that counts Neom as its crown jewel. Human Rights Watch has documented the repeated abuse of migrant workers on Saudi megaprojects. These workers, who are often charged outlandish recruitment fees, have had their phones destroyed and their immigration documents confiscated. Tens of thousands of people have died or suffered abject ruination in the service of a few glossy pictures. The shambolic project that killed or ruined them was made possible not only by a seemingly bottomless supply of oil money, but by the borrowed prestige of some of the West’s leading architecture firms.

The Line’s failure should serve as a warning to other firms seduced by outrageous consulting and design fees—not only for the sheer scale of its barbarism but for the obvious frivolity of its lies. Is it not humiliating to aid and abet a project that is so evidently bullshit? Was it not humiliating to have to pretend that Saudi Arabia’s sustainability goals were legitimate while the construction materials and transportation behind its projects wrested more carbon from the earth than most small countries do in a year?

Architecture is always political. Greed and the promise of creative freedom—which, of course, is always secured at a cost—lure architects toward countries that are looking to culture-wash their bad names through stadiums, cultural centers, luxury shopping districts, and dazzling hotels. The logic behind many of these bad choices is that everyone else is doing the same. Louis Vuitton is doing it. Formula One is doing it. If I don’t do it, somebody else will.

Architecture loves to present itself as a liberal or progressive field, shielding itself from reproach with its forays into sustainability and new, more egalitarian forms of living. And it does so all while taking sordid money and grinding its own workers to dust through overwork and underpayment. The ruins of the Line expose a cold truth, which is that these firms and their fountainheads have never been any different from any other capitalist enterprise. Like many others, they have blood on their hands.