Azeris Building Center to Honor Late Leader
By Lada Yevgrashina

Reuters
Tuesday, February 19, 2008. Issue 3845. Page 9.

BAKU, Azerbaijan — 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 plant for carmaker
BMW in Leipzig, to build a cultural center in honor of Heidar Aliyev,
the man who founded the ruling dynasty.

The undulating glass and aluminum 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 Armenia.

It will also deepen the posthumous cult of personality around the
former KGB officer who ran Azerbaijan for three decades until his
death in 2003. His son Ilham Aliyev, a reformed playboy, took over
the presidency.

"This center will be an example of respect for the legacy of Heidar
Aliyev and become a symbol of Azerbaijan’s modern capital," Ilham
Aliyev said at a ground-breaking ceremony.

The Baku cultural center 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,
a library, a museum and underground parking, the developers said.

Although they refuse to reveal how much it will cost, the project,
to be paid for by the government, is likely to run to tens of millions
of dollars.

It will be a major outlay for a country where, according to the World
Bank, the average monthly income is about $250 and 29 percent of the
population live in poverty.

Hadid is hailed as one of the world’s most important contemporary
architects. In 2004, she became the first woman to receive the Pritzker
Prize, the architecture world’s top award.