AZERBAIJAN SPLASHES OIL WEALTH ON PRESTIGE BUILDING
By Lada Yevgrashina
Reuters
Feb 11 2008
UK
BAKU, Feb 11 (Reuters) – Azerbaijan’s ruling elite has grown rich
from oil and now it is to acquire the ultimate status symbol: a
monument to the president’s father designed by one of the world’s
most sought-after architects.
The Azeri government has commissioned Zaha Hadid, an Iraqi-born Briton
best known for designing a cutting-edge new plant for carmaker BMW
(BMWG.DE: Quote, Profile, Research) in Leipzig, to build a cultural
centre in honour of Heydar Aliyev, the man who founded the ruling
dynasty.
The undulating glass and aluminium structure will rise up alongside
oil-blackened Soviet-era factories in the capital of a country
that just a few years ago was in economic chaos and reeling from a
territorial war with its neighbour Armenia.
It will also deepen the posthumous cult of personality around the
former KGB officer who ran Azerbaijan for three decades before his
death in 2003. His son Ilham Aliyev, a reformed playboy, took over
the presidency.
"This centre will be an example of respect for the legacy of Heydar
Aliyev and become a symbol of Azerbaijan’s modern capital," Ilham
Aliyev said at a ground-breaking ceremony for the cultural centre.
OIL WEALTH
Azerbaijan is following the example of other ex-Soviet states that
have brought in big-name architects to translate their new-found oil
wealth into steel and concrete.
Kazakhstan, home to the world’s biggest new oil discovery in more
than 30 years, hired Britain’s Lord Norman Foster to design a huge
glass pyramid in its capital Astana, a city built almost from scratch
in the empty steppes.
Foster is also behind a tapering skyscraper in the Russian capital that
its builders say will be the tallest building in Europe. The tower
will be the centrepiece of a development that symbolises Russia’s
oil-driven economic boom.
The Baku cultural centre will be the most distinctive building to go
up in the Caspian Sea city in a generation.
Slated for completion by the end of 2009, it will house a concert
hall seating 1,284 people, a library, a museum and underground parking
for 1,350 cars, the developers say.
Although they refuse to reveal how much it will cost, the project,
to be paid for by the government, is likely to run into tens of
millions of dollars.
It will be a major outlay for country where, according to the World
Bank, the average monthly income is about $250 and 29 percent of the
population live in poverty.
But the state’s coffers, now recovered from the chaos of the 1990s,
are bulging with revenues from the oil that Azerbaijan, in conjunction
with a BP-led (BP.L: Quote, Profile, Research) consortium, exports
along a pipeline to the Mediterranean Sea.
Hadid is hailed as one of the world’s most important contemporary
architects. In 2004 she was awarded the Pritzker Prize, the
architecture world’s equivalent of the Nobel prize, the first woman
to receive the award.
Among her recent high-profile commissions is a $146 million aquatics
centre for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. (Writing by Christian
Lowe; Editing by Catherine Evans)