The ambitious development of the Saudi Arabian region of Neom is “dedicated to the sanctity of all life on Earth,” a public-relations push says.
Well, not quite all, it turns out. It has been reported that three members of the Huwaitat tribe, arrested for protesting against the forced eviction of their and other families to make way for it, have been sentenced to death. Another protester from the tribe was shot dead by security forces in 2020.
For all those businesses and consultants who help to plan, design, build, market and otherwise enable monuments for tyrants, that poses an old question with new force: What point is too much? When will whatever gain that might arise from the creation of extraordinary buildings cease to outweigh the atrocities that go with them?
Illustration: Mountain People
Neom is arguably the most dramatic project in the world of architecture and construction right now. It includes The Line, a planned structure to house 9 million people that is to run dead straight for 170km, projecting at one end into the Red Sea, but would be only 200m wide. It is to be flanked on either side by 500m-high walls of building, mirrored on the outside. Imagine a tower taller than the Empire State Building extruded from England’s Birmingham to Leeds, and then doubled, and you have an idea of the scale. There have been some doubts whether The Line would truly happen, but last week, drone footage showed that a start has been made on digging its foundations.
It would be “a civilizational revolution that puts humans first, based on a radical change in urban planning,” Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman said. It comes with extravagant promises about sustainability. It would allegedly “blend with nature.”
Neom also includes Oxagon, a city for tech industries built on the sea, and Trojena, a mountain region where, with the help of yet more spectacular architecture, the 2029 Asian Winter Games are to be held.
The Line raises doubts, urbanistically speaking. How can such a colossal project be in any sense sustainable, given that its construction would produce, based on one estimate, more than 1.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide — equivalent to more than four years of the UK’s entire emissions? What is the benefit of its height, when there is so much desert in which it could spread out? What would actually be good about life in this deep narrow canyon, probably subjected to high levels of surveillance and control?
The salient fact about Neom is that it is clearly an instrument of soft and hard power wielded by an exceptionally murderous and repressive regime. It is aided and abetted by Western consultancies such as the once-hip Californian practice of Morphosis (which is designing The Line) and the London-based Zaha Hadid Architects (at work in Trojena), both of which are winners of the biggest prize in architecture, the Pritzker. How might they square what is left of their progressive reputations with a real-estate endeavor where objectors get killed?
It is not a new issue. Monumental architecture has gone with power since ancient Egypt and before, and powerful regimes tend to be brutal. More recent examples include the decision by the also Pritzker-winning Dutch practice OMA to design the vast headquarters of the Chinese government’s main television station China Central Television (CCTV), completed in 2012. As the writer Ian Buruma asked: Would they have done the same favor for Augusto Pinochet’s Chile? You could also look at the stadiums built for the forthcoming World Cup in Qatar, with the notorious and lethal exploitation of migrant workers.
The arguments for collaboration are well aired. OMA’s case for working on the CCTV building was that it was good to engage with and encourage the more forward-thinking elements in Chinese society — and that if they did not design the building, some big bland US company would step in and do it anyway. In which case, it would be better to get some remarkable architecture out of the situation than none at all.
Architects and other construction professionals can also point to the ways that governments and businesses consort with despots — how UK arms exports help to kill civilians in Yemen, for example, or how British ministers and ever-obliging British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Neil Crompton smoothed the way for the Saudi takeover of Newcastle United Football Club. However, if they want to claim any sort of cultural leadership, the people who design buildings could start with their choice of clients.
Lines do get drawn, if hazily. Practices that were happy until this year to work for Russian President Vladmir Putin’s cronies now do not go near them. British architect Norman Foster (a Pritzker winner) withdrew from the advisory board of Neom over the murder of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, but his practice continues to work on Saudi Arabian projects such as the Red Sea airport and an “experiential marine-life center.” Some architects will work in China, some will not.
Then, when there is no further room for equivocation, previous positions look weak. When Russia invaded Ukraine, previous attempts at “engagement” looked at best futile. OMA’s relatively enlightened Chinese allies have lost the argument there, and, for all their good intentions, the CCTV headquarters ended up as a dominating and excluding tool of control. There must be a possibility that Saudi Arabia would one day acquire the international pariah status Russia now has (and there is already no moral distinction between them).
In which case, why wait? Why not decide now that murder is too high a price to pay for architectural glory? This position might conceivably deprive the world of a few monuments at which tourists of the future might gawp, in which case we should thank the pharaohs and their ilk for previously laying in a good supply of such things. A boycott of projects such as Neom would, more probably, slow the creation of follies that eat energy, belch carbon and make no practical sense.
Rowan Moore is The Observer’s architecture correspondent.
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