Architecture as Power Play
The biggest and most famous artifacts on Earth have long been more about politics and power than about the literal functions they serve, turning fame and fortune-seeking architects into pawns and abettors in a hubris-laden game. We can do better.
It read like a skit from Monty Python: “a group of mathematicians pull out their calculators to show one of the planet’s most powerful men—a royal, no less—that he must’ve made an error, and that the 170km (110mi) long city he’s building from scratch should’ve been a circle instead of a line.
Alas, no laughter ensued.
NEOM—named for the Greek “neo” (new) and Arabic “mustaqbal” (future)—struck me as an act of cosmic hubris since I first read about it in disbelief, not the forward-thinking way of housing nine million people it said it was.
Once one looks past the manufactured simplicity of its cardinal gesture, the Saudi ruler’s choice to build NEOM as a single ramrod-straight, 200m (650ft) wide, 500m (1640ft) tall unbroken line—with a mirror polish, no less—can realistically be seen as an act of war against the very planet whose impact it purports to minimize.
