Some people seem to think so.

When Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman proposed building a 110-mile horizontal urban “skyscraper” called the Line near the border of Jordan and Egypt in 2020—the centerpiece of a vast new planned city called NEOM—many of the world’s most prestigious firms clamored to sign up. These ranged from the usual suspects of neoliberal future-making, like Thom Mayne’s aesthetically erratic outfit Morphosis, to firms that inherited the city-building impulses of modernism, such as Peter Cook and an I.M. Pei–less Pei Cobb Freed.

All of this, of course, was managed by the notorious architecture-and-construction-slash-defense-contractor AECOM, which also happens to be handling the structural logistics for Donald Trump’s ballroom and Benjamin Netanyahu’s sinister, NEOM-esque Gaza 2035 master plan.

Its downfall was recently confirmed in a long Financial Times exposé detailing how the scope of bin Salman’s vision has shrunk to basically nothing. The “chandelier” (the central upside-down skyscraper) was derailed by the fact that the earth spins, the wind blows, and human waste can’t be flushed upward. THE LINE’s reflective surface and wind-turbine farm basically created a bird-slaughtering machine along one of the world’s most important migratory routes. Meanwhile, amid a culture of secrecy and retribution, architects and planners were basically forced to agree with whatever bin Salman thought was interesting or worthwhile, a process that mostly relied on a nonstop parade of spectacular renderings.

Was it not humiliating to have to pretend that Saudi Arabia’s sustainability goals were legitimate while the construction materials and transportation behind its projects wrested more carbon from the earth than most small countries do in a year?

Read the full story at The Nation