Another Tale of Two Cities

Kuwait plans new £132bn metropolis – The Guardian – Owen Bowcott – 23 July 08

Oil prices have so swollen Kuwait’s national coffers that the petroleum-rich state is to invest $132bn (£66bn) on its ambitious “Silk City” at the head of the Gulf, it emerged yesterday.

The extraordinary scale of the metropolis – a 1,001-metre skyscraper, wildlife reserves, and homes for 700,000 people – is matched by a plan to also build an international rail network linking it to Damascus, Baghdad, Iran and China.

Contrast with:

Why Foreign Investors Love Landmarks Like the Chrysler Building – Bloomberg – James S. Russell – 23 July 08

When Abu Dhabi interests snapped up the Chrysler Building, the beloved 1930 skyscraper festooned with stainless-steel gargoyles and hubcaps, New Yorkers shuddered. Is New York still New York if its trophies are sold off to foreign interests? Why do peak oil investors love our landmarks?…What’s next? The Seagram Building? And why not the Empire State Building? Or Rockefeller Center (again)?…

Oil-patch buyers are not only flush with cash, the Chrysler’s dizzying $800 million price for a controlling stake feels more like, say, $500 million if you’re paying in a strong currency…

The Manhattan office-tower market slumbers in comparison to the building frenzy that engulfs the United Arab Emirates, Beijing, Moscow or Pusan, South Korea…

The instant skyline of Dubai’s Sheik Zayed Road is a cacophony of name-brand icons and trophy wannabes. There are so many towers topped with domes, wedges and spires that Rem Koolhaas’s Office of Metropolitan Architecture tried to differentiate a skyscraper proposal with a design that was self- consciously boring…

American commercial architecture is now the most timid and innovation-averse in the developed world. That makes genuine trophy buildings more valuable…

The Chrysler sale also disturbs with its implication that oil wealth and hypergrowth in China and India are shifting the economic center of gravity away from America.

We should be glad the petro-rich want to plow their huge gains back into America. After all, the U.S., with 5 percent of the world’s population, is buying one-fourth of its oil. Until we stop whining about gas prices and put some real muscle into changing that equation, we’ll see many more landmarks fall into the hands of foreigners whose wealth we’ve created.