It may now be seen as a dystopian nightmare, the far-flung folly of an autocrat desperate for global approval, but the idea of building a self-contained linear city has preoccupied the imaginations of architects and planners for generations. The Line might bill itself as a “never-before-seen approach to urbanisation”, but the principles behind it have been proposed many times over – though never successfully realised. — The Guardian
The Guardian critic writes that the outlandish NEOM project structure resembled a “habitable supercomputer” and cites a recent Bloomberg report that names Marvel Comics designer Olivier Pron as one of its many non-architect digital designers before pinning the massive project’s “ominous dystopian undertone” on Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman’s apparent penchant for cyberpunk aesthetics. “If ever there was an urban vision that embraced our end-of-days climate apocalypse,” he laments, “then this is it.”
Wainwright then turns to the architectural history books for further insights into the history of the linear megacity concept. Examples from a young Michael Graves/Peter Eisenman pairing, Superstudio, Kenzo Tange, Le Corbusier, Edgar Chambless, constructivist Mikhail Okhitovich, and 19th-century Spanish planner Arturo Soria y Mata, whom Wainwright claims invented the idea in an El Progreso article in 1882, are all listed as precursors. He closes by warning that its yet-unverified designer could risk being remembered for attempting an “Ozymandian bookend to 140 years of deluded urban fantasies.”
7 Comments
I wonder - when projects are so low on resolution and big on ideas like NEOM, what can architects offer that the likes of game designers, film production studios, megalomaniac despots, or even fashion moguls can't offer?
There is no engineering, detailing, planning, or even architecture at this point. It is a canvas of dreams now, where the more evocative of current expectations of "futuristic" the better. In the arena of ideas, architects don't reign supreme. Heck, a 12-year old Roblox player can probably come up with a one-liner as dazzlingly wild as even the most grizzled architect. We're talking ideas after all, not professional services.
MBS wants cyberpunk, so he hired the most cyberpunk-ish starchitect around (Morphosis) as well as the best production designers Hollywood could offer. There is an image to be sold and perhaps even built. How that image ends up built will eventually fall onto the professional laps of the AEC industry but the initial, all-important envisioning could have little to do with architects.
I'm reminded of the Big Man era of building in the US, where larger than life personalities such as Moses and Rockefeller dictated their designs to armies of professional architects and engineers. Neither are trained in AEC but both have the political and financial wherewithal, and not to mention the vision (for better or worse), to recruit the pros needed to execute their ideas to the letter.
Perhaps an architect would have envisioned better designs but the profession is rarely in a position to decide what gets built. Hell, even Haussmanm was a bureaucrat and politician. One architect who did his way - John Portman, and he did so by mastering the real estate business. Only then did Portman manage to realize his vision of vast public interiors, which ironically enough NEOM reminds me of!
Actually, the adventures of modernists in the third world might be a counterpoint. There, architects and planners did manage to impose their stark modernist visions on tabula rasa thanks to their courtship of local rulers rich in ambition but low on ideas during the Cold War.
"I'm reminded of the Big Man era of building in the US, where larger than life personalities such as Moses and Rockefeller dictated their designs to armies of professional architects and engineers. Neither are trained in AEC but both have the political and financial wherewithal, and not to mention the vision (for better or worse), to recruit the pros needed to execute their ideas to the letter."
This deserves a slow clap. Well said.
Yona's sketches from the 1960s were more resolved and intelligent than this nonsense.
More than 50 years ago Glen Small had a megastructure idea, promising a beautiful and ecological life that could expand and consume itself. Biomorphic Biosphere disseminates a utopian, the Line evokes a dystopian mindset. As founding faculty of SCI-Arc, Glen and Thom don't get along (not my problem);)).
https://www.smallatlarge.com/2...
Groovy!
Oh I'd love the quasi-body horror dream of architecture as a growing, living organism. No more mimicing nature and no more studs and bolts - a building made of living tissue that breathes and heaves like the skyscraping beast it is.
Architects would design the genetic structure of these creatures, choreographing its anticipated skeletal structure and bodily functions before sowing the seeds for the architectural creature to grow to its full size. It is devoid of sentience of course until one day ...
It may now be seen as a dystopian nightmare, the far-flung folly of an autocrat desperate for global approval. . . .
Desperation as the hidden motivation for utopia—he's not alone.
This one should make the books as well, years from now, hopefully as far as it goes.
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