Tarnished by Association

[“The borrowed prestige of some of the West’s leading architecture firms”]
Over at The Nation, Kate Wagner has a wonderful indictment of those businesses which have participated in The Line, Saudi Arabia’s preposterous mega-project.

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).

Wagner is piggybacking on the Financial Times report previously linked back in November, which details how the project is failing. Calling out all those who sold themselves out to participate, however, is worthwhile.

Link: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/the-line-neom-saudi-vision-2030/