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The most unusual city in the world, a’la The Jetsons stylee…
Wikitravel: “Ashgabat is a showpiece capital. It has been designed, at the cost of billions of dollars, to show the world about the glories and accomplishments of the Turkmen. The city looks like none other on Earth – a thoroughly artificial collection of white marble buildings across a long, dry valley. At sunrise or sunset, there’s a beauty to this uniform, outsized ambition, as if the set of a science-fiction film suddenly became an actual human settlement. During the scorching days, when walking from monument to monument across the shadeless streets, or trying to locate anything resembling normal human life in the center, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil seems like the most accurate comparison”.
_ After Turkmenistan gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Ashgabat experienced a second birth. Today, modern Ashgabat is jokingly called the “city of the dead”, because it is almost impossible to see people in the new districts of white marble. The city holds the Guinness Book of Records title for most white marble on Earth. It holds several records, in fact: the world’s largest enclosed observation wheel, the largest fountain, the largest mural of a star. The new airport has the world’s largest image of a Turkmen carpet, adorning the main passenger terminal. Until recently, the capital even boasted the world’s tallest flagstaff. All of these new toys, these buildings, parks and roads, were supposedly built for the people. They paid for it with their silence.
I find the whole place intriguing… for me, it’s not about the architectural aesthetics of the buildings, but it’s history and unique design. I sometimes tend to subjectivity remove myself from situations, in favour of an objective view of some things… not all things.
I do find the futuristic highways and city-scape aesthetically pleasing, as I’d envisioned a world like that by now, so I’m quite pleased that this place exists.
Please call the city’s Planning Department’s complaints division for your architectural complaint, and the Presidential HR complaints division for your megalomaniac-ruler complaint.
In the meantime, I have experienced so many different kinds of madness in so many different people that nothing surprises me any more and I am practising ever greater serenity, tranquility.
I see… such people need to be kept at arms distance… or further.
That city has free-energy, so quite a benevolent act to pass. I don’t find that showing off your capital’s wealth a malevolent thing, as even third-world cities do it.
I wouldn’t want to see either depiction over and over again, and after 40,000 years I’m sure there’s room for both of them. Sorry, but I’m not of your everything has to be classical ilk… you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all… I like visual variety.
I just don’t like the new styles, because they simply no longer have anything to do with aesthetics in the positive sense (beauty), but only in the negative sense (ugliness, destructiveness - and the excuses for this are also ugly and destructive).
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