Revivalism produces strange bedfellows. Or maybe it’s better to say, with apologies to Marx, that utopian architecture, as distinct from other varieties, happens twice: the first time as critique, second as control.
Consider Saudi Arabia’s plan to build a linear city for nine million people, known as the Line, in the remote desert in the country’s northwestern corner, territory lying across the Gulf of Aqaba from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and opening to the south, along a broad crescent of coastline, onto the Red Sea. Part of a larger collection of planned Saudi cities called Neom, the Line takes the form of a single horizontal building, 1,600 feet tall and wrapped in mirrored glass, designed to stretch 105 miles along a precise east-west axis from the mountains to the waterfront. Entirely free of roads and cars, this self-contained interior world, reflecting a broader Saudi Arabian effort to diversify its economy beyond oil, is expected to be connected horizontally by rail, including high-speed lines, and vertically by stairs and elevators. Its claims to carbon-consciousness are somewhat undercut by the presumptive size of the air-conditioning bill; temperatures in this part of Saudi Arabia routinely exceed 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the warmer months.
The Line’s similarities to a number of unbuilt proposals from the late 1960s, particularly influential designs by UK’s Archigram and the Florentine collectives Superstudio and Atelier Ziggurat, are impossible to miss for anyone even moderately familiar with the last century of architectural history or urban theory. Its backers in the architecture profession and the Saudi ruling family—including the country’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS—have described the Line as possessing the courage to see to completion radically optimistic visions sketched out more than fifty years ago that were never realized. In a made-for-TV documentary on the project produced by the Discovery Channel and released earlier this year, the narrator, Toby Stephens, reading copy written by David Adam, describes the Line as “one of the most anticipated and intriguing projects in the history of city making.” Thom Mayne, seventy-nine, whose Los Angeles office Morphosis, according to several published reports, is among the chief designers of the Line, adds: “I can’t think of anybody that wouldn’t want to be part of this project. It’s going to be without a question the single most extraordinary piece of work that begins in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.” Reinier de Graaf, who, as a principal of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), seems to have replaced Rem Koolhaas as the firm’s public, quasi-ironic voice in the last couple of years, concludes that the “phantasmagoria of the late ’60s is sort of living its finest hour in the Arabian desert.” OMA, alongside HOK, participated in the design competition for the Line, as well as the Discovery Channel documentary, but is not currently working on the project. (An exhibition mounted as an unofficial addition to this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale revealed that the firms working on the Line or other Neom projects have included Adjaye Associates, BIG, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Studio Fuksas, Oyler Wu Collaborative, and UNStudio.) But it is the presence in the TV program—and on the design team—of Peter Cook, the eighty-seven-year-old co-founder of Archigram, that cements the connection between the Saudi megaproject and those influential earlier examples of counterculture architecture. Cook suggests not only that the Line picks up where Archigram left off but that in a larger sense the Saudi venture offers a corrective to a creeping caution in architecture culture, a conservatism that over the last decade or so has left a certain kind of utopian project out of fashion and, as a result, clearly left him feeling out of step.
“It’s always assumed that the young are more progressive,” Cook says. “Now I think that the youngest architects are nervous. They’re very nervous. They’re not natural experimenters. They’re a bit scared.”
He adds, his top lip curling into a smile, “There is a sort of moral atmosphere at the moment. You shouldn’t be too clever; you shouldn’t be too experimental. Don’t do anything too funky. I came out of a funky period.”
Some Neom construction has already required the displacement of members of the Indigenous Howeitat tribe. According to ALQST, a UK-based human-rights organization, forty-seven tribespeople have been detained or arrested after objecting to the project, with five sentenced to death. Despite widely published reports of that displacement, there’s little secret why the Line’s planners think they’ll manage to avoid the unbuilt fate of those earlier Archigram and Superstudio designs: It has the backing of—and indeed has become a key milestone for—MBS and his government. As the Crown Prince says in the documentary, “Any new city has to be top-down. If it’s top-down, then you can design something like this.”
There is top-down rule, of course, and then there is the version practiced by the current Saudi regime. According to U.S. intelligence agencies, MBS personally ordered the capture of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident journalist living in the United States who visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 to collect papers related to his upcoming marriage. Khashoggi was taken into custody inside the consulate and tortured by a team of fifteen Saudi operatives sent to Turkey by MBS to intercept him. His body was then cut into pieces with a bone saw, a procedure that according to one source began while Khashoggi was still alive. This summer, a retired teacher named Mohammed bin Nasser al-Ghamdi was sentenced to death for comments he made on X, formerly Twitter, criticizing the Saudi government, part of an ongoing pattern of reprisals against critics of the regime. (By all accounts al-Ghamdi was not a prominent dissident but a private citizen leading a quiet life, with what the New York Times called “almost no public profile,” who was compelled to use social-media as one of the few outlets open to him to express complaints about his government.) According to the PEN America Freedom to Write Index, Saudi Arabia trails only China and Iran in a global ranking of governments currently imprisoning the most writers.
There is also the particular history of the most ambitious megastructure proposals from the 1960s to consider. His younger collaborators on the Line may be unaware, but surely Cook recalls that many of these designs were originally offered as critiques, rather than endorsements, of muscular city-making at Brobdingnagian scale. Superstudio’s Continuous Monument of 1969–70, the precedent to which the Line owes the most obvious debt, offered a cautionary tale about the implications of extending the urban grid of places like Manhattan into undeveloped territory (such as, say, a desert landscape). Adolfo Natalini, the driving force behind Superstudio, put it plainly in 1971: “If design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design; if architecture is merely the codifying of the bourgeois models of ownership and society, then we must reject architecture; if architecture and town planning is merely the formalization of present unjust social divisions, then we must reject town planning and its cities—until all design activities are aimed towards meeting primary needs. Until then design must disappear. We can live without architecture.” Natalini’s collaborator on the project, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, observed that Continuous Monument, “through the images of a negative (critical) Utopia, pushed to extremes the classical conception of the relationship between nature and architecture, city and country.”
Though the Line’s completion date remains anybody’s guess, preliminary construction work to clear a portion of the building site has already begun. (Satellite images published in June confirmed as much.) Which leaves us in a surprising place, architecturally speaking. To take an antiestablishment paper architecture, born of 1960s counterculture tumult and all too happy to reject the possibility of its realization, especially if that rejection would safeguard the ethics at its core, and proceed to build it in service of an authoritarian vision in one of the least equal societies on earth: This is the basic contradiction that the Line embodies, and that its architectural authors, at least in any public forum I’m aware of, have been careful to avoid confronting. The possibility of non-disclosure agreements between those authors and Neom planners may help explain that silence. Neither Morphosis nor Cook’s firm, London-based Cook Haffner Architecture Platform, responded to requests from NYRA for comment.
What attracted certain Western architects to the challenge of building the Line, and what in turn led the Saudi leadership to engage certain Western architects? While none of the participating architects’ fees have been disclosed, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Neom has lured Western talent by offering annual salaries for top executives on the project that average $1.1 million, or “more than twice as much as American c-suite level executives typically make” for similar positions. Cook’s history of confessing to a lack of partisan conviction is surely a relevant detail in his case; he remarked in 2017, on a podcast produced by Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, that Archigram was “curious in that we were not particularly political.”
A mutual taste for grandiosity in architecture and planning—the design-world version of a Nietzschean will to power— may be another answer. In January of 2005, Arthur Lubow published a profile of Mayne in the New York Times Magazine that related what is now a familiar story: how the architect, despite describing himself as a blue-chip list of institutional and government clients, including the federal General Services Administration and California’s Department of Transportation. I contributed to this narrative with an article in the Los Angeles Times the same year, following the announcement that Mayne had won the Pritzker Prize, in which I quoted the architect expressing admiration for the progressive social movements of the 1960s, which he first encountered as a student in the architecture department at the University of Southern California. “There’s no question that I left USC feeling inspired by all of that and connected to it, whether it was the Kennedys or Eldridge Cleaver,” he told me as we sat at a café near his office. In retrospect, perhaps I should I have paid more careful attention to Mayne’s choice of inspirational figures: the political gap between the Kennedy administration and the Black Panthers is wider than the one in architecture between, say, Gensler and Dank Lloyd Wright. Mayne was less naming personal heroes than throwing darts at a historical timeline.
With the benefit of greater hindsight, and the ability to measure Mayne’s repeated self-identification as a leftist and progressive against the long arc of his career, it becomes clear that his unapologetic embrace of the Line as a project is less a contradiction than the culmination of tendencies that have been apparent, more latent at certain points than others, in his work for many years. Another way to say this is that Mayne has displayed for at least two decades now a taste for the macro gesture, with little (and decidedly fading) concern about its human implications or on-the-ground details. “I’m not interested in the social stuff at all. I really don’t care what a client thinks,” he said in a lecture in Rotterdam earlier this year. “I’m just being honest.” I know that I now look at Mayne’s role as a champion for big-ticket urban-planning ideas in Los Angeles in a different light than I once did. In 2006, as part of a team with Field Operations in a competition to reimagine what is now known as the State Historic Park on the edge of L.A.’s Chinatown, Mayne blithely ignored the brief in favor of a proposal to build a new Dodger Stadium on the park site, freeing up room for housing and green space on the stadium’s extensive parking lot. (As the crow flies, the distance between the two sites is less than a mile.) A decade later, as a member of the UCLA architecture faculty, Mayne oversaw a project calling for Wilshire Boulevard to be recast as a high-density, linear downtown for Los Angeles, lined with a new collection of towers. In both cases, as I noted in a piece on the park competition, these visions appeared “to have been drawn up inside a helicopter hovering high above” the city. If I were writing that article today, I certainly would draw out that observation and its implications to a greater degree than I did the first time around.
In neither case, after all, did Mayne participate in, or spend much time articulating the need for, the political legwork required to build support for his increasingly grand and Robert Moses–style vision for Los Angeles. Indeed, Mayne’s impatience with the fine-grained aspects of both architecture and urban planning has become difficult to ignore. Recall Oliver Wainwright’s Guardian review, in late 2022, of Morphosis’s new building for the Orange County Museum of Art in Costa Mesa, California:
Sheets of buckled steel are screwed crookedly against the edge of the undulating facade, hastily cut tiles have been fitted with wonky abandon, while other parts of the building are literally held on with tape. A temporary clamp keeps part of a soffit from falling down, while glass balustrades lean at precarious angles, their oversized steel fixing plates bolted with Frankenstein glee. The shop of horrors continues inside, where sheets of painted foam-board stand in place of steel coping, cracked glass floors line precipitous aerial walkways, and suspended ceilings appear to have been cobbled together from whatever leftover bits were lying around.
Inconveniently enough, the challenges facing the architects of the Line, now that its macro outlines have been sketched out, will increasingly have to do with such minutiae and practicalities, to say nothing of “the social stuff.” In the Venice exhibition, at least, such details had yet to be attended to; as Tom Wilkinson wrote for Apollo, if that display was “anything to go by, the future will comprise lightless canyons filled with indecipherable blobs.”
One curious aspect of the decision by the architecture team behind the Line to rescue Continuous Monument from the history books and toss it down thuddingly, largely unchanged from the original, in the Saudi desert is that it overlooks the range of ways the Superstudio design has been tweaked and subverted across the intervening decades, and as a result how its meanings and cultural resonances have evolved. In 2014, the artists Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib released a five-minute film called Routine Maintenance. It imagines that Continuous Monument has been built—in an arid landscape not so different, at first glance, from the northwest corner of Saudi Arabia—and features, as its only action, a solitary window washer hanging from a cleaning rig near the top of the structure and scrubbing its reflective surface with a towel. Routine Maintenance is in turn reminiscent of both the 2008 film Koolhaas Houselife, by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, which follows Guadalupe Acedo as she cleans OMA’s famous Maison à Bordeaux, completed in 1998, and Clarissa Tossin’s 2009 video-art piece White Marble Everyday, which focuses on the maintenance of Oscar Niemeyer’s Federal Supreme Court complex in Brasilia. In both cases the filmmakers use a patient focus on labor to suggest the needs that works of architecture begin imposing on the world once they are realized. Hironaka and Suib add a layer of irony, or at least raised eyebrows, to this line of critique. Acedo manages quite capably to oversee the upkeep of the house in Bordeaux, a discrete and finite work of architecture. If Continuous Monument, on the other hand, were to be built, Hironaka and Suib suggest, its maintenance would itself be continuous, which is another way of saying Sisyphean. And now we have the Saudi government preparing to build the rock as well as the hill to roll it up, so to speak, all in a single gesture.
Plans for the Line may already be cracking under the weight of their own ambition and aggressive construction timetable. Neom chief executive Nadhmi al-Nasr has come under fire for creating a toxic workplace, leading to a marked employee exodus in recent months. As the Wall Street Journal reported, “Many recruits are now fleeing, turned off by a management culture that former executives say at its worst belittles expatriates, makes unrealistic demands and turns a blind eye to discrimination.” Journal reporters listened to a recording on which Nasr crowed about his management style. “I drive everybody like a slave,” he says. “When they drop down dead, I celebrate. That’s how I do my projects.” In another meeting, according to the newspaper, “Mr. Nasr told one executive to walk into the desert to die, so he could urinate on his grave.”
It is a tough connection to prove in any quantifiable sense, but my career as a critic has led me to believe unshakably in the idea that the convictions that give rise to a work of architecture, on paper or in built form, remain permanently and unalterably embedded in that work. I would even go so far as to say that those convictions shape even designs inspired or informed by the original architecture, the way DNA shape the offspring of living things across several generations. In that sense, the Line architects’ choice of Continuous Monument and similar megastructures as the basis of a new city in the Saudi desert was a decision, by all indications an unwitting one, to embrace the critique at the heart of the original and even the ways in which that point of view has mutated and evolved in projects such as Routine Maintenance. Even putting aside the many practical and logistical obstacles it faces, the Line may have been destined from its inception to fracture from the inside out. In the Marxian formation we began with, the first act necessarily trumps the second: any project born of genuine and timely critique turns into a Trojan horse for its own failure, or at least destabilization, the moment it is put to authoritarian ends. (The fate of the 2008 Beijing Olympic projects supports this point of view, though that is fodder for a separate essay.) It is now largely a matter of watching to see if the Saudi government abandons the Line, at least as it is currently conceived, before or shortly after it welcomes its first residents. The other sections of Neom, designed less with visionary counterculture architecture as an inspiration and more along the lines of Las Vegas, Dubai, Doha, and Amangiri, are likelier to see a smoother path to full operation.