'Norman Said The President Wants A Pyramid': How Starchitects Built Astana

Many of the greatest wonders of ancient architecture are the products of the megalomaniac dreams of rulers long past. From the Pyramids to the Great Wall, the Terracotta Army and the Colosseum, all of these monumental works betrayed a style of governance that concentrates power in a small area, and usually in a single person. With the most famous examples of this existing in the past, one of would be forgiven for thinking that in the modern day such projects do not continue to be built.

But of course, megalomaniac leaders are not banished to the past, so why should their monumental projects not continue as well?

Which brings us to Astana, Kazakhstan, possibly one of the best modern examples of this in practice. After deciding to move his capital city to a remote area of the Kazakh steppe, the country's president Nursultan Nazarbayev decided to build a new, monumental capital, sucking up financial resources from his otherwise impoverished population.

Now, 20 years later, Astana stands as a bizarre monument to this vision. Filled with gleaming modern skyscrapers, glass pyramids, towering gold pillars, and some of the weirdest architecture in the world, the city's existence defies logic. So much money has been poured into this single vanity project that it is truly a work to rival the monuments of the ancients.

Oliver Wainwright's article for the Guardian takes a deep dive into the way this city was built and how, despite it reflecting Nazarbayev's somewhat strange vision, it was nonetheless designed with the help of some of the world's leading 'starchitects'. It juxtaposes the grand ambition of the project with the country's poor and oppressive reality and asks the question if it was really worth the cost. With the 2018 World Expo due to be held in Astana next year, the article is an important investigation into a city about to be thrust into the public limelight.