Word: riyadh
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Saudis of foreign intrusion that they have embarked on a substantial military buildup. Growing concerns about the safety of its oil fields have led the kingdom to boost defense outlays every year since the Iran-Iraq war started in 1980. Allocations for defense and internal security are now Riyadh's largest single expenditure. They totaled $17.7 billion last year and represented nearly a third of all government spending...
Most Saudis owe their prosperity to the vast amounts of money the government has poured into development projects over the past decade. While some of these, like the $3.4 billion international airport at the capital city of Riyadh, are attractive and useful, others seem destined for white elephanthood. One 1,800-acre complex dubbed the "diplomatic quarter" features a lavish sports club complete with a wave machine that creates surf in a vast swimming pool. Though the club is intended to house 7,000 diplomats and their families, skeptics question whether it will attract a third that number...
...government has found many ways to spend money. To ensure ample supplies < of grain, Riyadh has paid growers six times the world price for their output. But since the kingdom consumes only about half the nearly 2 million tons that farmers produce annually, Saudi Arabia has a grain glut. Efforts to raise livestock have been troubled. The Saudi Arabian Agriculture and Dairy Co., which opened in 1980, managed to breed 15,000 cows over the following five years. But the $100 million total cost was so great that the firm had to refinance its debts...
...slowdown comes at a time when such monumental undertakings as the $3.4 billion Riyadh International Airport and the $18 billion industrial city of Jubail are largely complete. Yet those and other ambitious projects will now cost millions to maintain. Perhaps because of that, the suddenly penny- pinching Saudis have been making life miserable for foreign companies accustomed to more opulent treatment. "It's horrible now," says one American contractor in Riyadh. "They don't pay, there's little new business, and they nickel-and-dime you to death with inspections and rules...
Moreover, at MOMA one does not see any work of Mies' legion of followers, the modern architects who have remade and ravaged downtowns from Los Angeles to Riyadh. Mies was personally taciturn, but his vision was evangelical. He claimed that he had the answer, that his modern style was an architectural ultimate. "With Mies," wrote MOMA's Drexler in 1960, "architecture leaves childhood behind." In fact, it seems that Mies' example, brilliant in itself, provoked a prolonged architectural adolescence, a period when a stylistic conformism was enforced. To be modern, a building was obliged to wear what Critic Reyner Banham...