The first images of the new Saudi megalopolis Neom have been unveiled [le 25 juillet]. We see a kind of long sparkling conduit, covered with mirrors, which pierces the desert in the northwest of the country.
This city worth several hundred billion dollars, supposed to accommodate 9 million inhabitants over 170 km in length – according to the project’s website – certainly does not lack ambition.
In 1969, a group of Italian architects with radical ideas had also presented a “continuous” city project: a self-sufficient city nestled in a white squared wall a mile wide [1,6 km], crossing the Arizona desert. The resemblance is striking, with one difference: the Superstudio project was only a provocation, not a real proposal. Its creators conceived it as an architectural satire, to denounce the propensity of modernist architects to disregard the context of their projects.
But like the interiors imagined by Stanley Kubrick in 2001, a space odyssey, or the strange visions of nature produced by the extraterrestrial creature of Solaris, by Andrei Tarkovski (more or less at the same time), these images were so beautiful that they entered the collective imagination. We have made utopian fantasies of them, forgetting in the process their dystopian origins.
An interesting allegory
Neom is the current embodiment of this phenomenon: a city in the form of a wall, hermetically sealed, built in the middle of an inhospitable desert and made habitable thanks to the help of technology alone. Its facade of mirrors, which is reminiscent of avia glasses