*METROPOLIS has got some top-notch stuff in it. Heck of a mag.
http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20120511/cities-of-the-imagination
(...)
" “What’s going on now in the Gulf has rightly been called the Las Vegas of culture,” says Nezar AlSayyad, a professor of architecture, planning, urban design, and urban history at the University of California, Berkeley. “But there is actually a well-established precedent among Arab elites for relying on foreign design expertise for the building of important political and cultural symbols. Traditionally, the caliphs and emirs throughout the various Islamic dynasties called on architects in Anatolia [in what is now Turkey], or from Cairo, or even southern Spain and North Africa.”
(...)
"Given the bitter missteps that were made in the pursuit of modernism in the Middle East during the last century, this constitutes progress. At the Center for Architecture, a somber room exhibiting some of the historical mistakes made in the 1950s accompanies the showcase of modern work. City of Mirages: Baghdad, 1952–1982 recalls a moment in Iraqi history when anything seemed possible. On display are Walter Gropius’s cartoonish dome for the University of Baghdad campus, Frank Lloyd Wright’s mythical master plan for central Baghdad, and C. A. Doxiadis’s rationalist grid project for the Al Thawra neighborhood of Baghdad that later became known as Sadr City—the Shia ghetto that became a center of violence, repression, and sectarian carnage in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq...."
