Posted Feb 8, 2013, 11:05 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
Posts: 51,869
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/ma...anted=all&_r=0
Azerbaijan Is Rich. Now It Wants to Be Famous.
By PETER SAVODNIK
February 8, 2013
Quote:
In March 2010, Ibrahim Ibrahimov was on the three-hour Azerbaijan Airlines flight from Dubai to Baku when he had a vision. “I wanted to build a city, but I didn’t know how,” Ibrahimov recalled. “I closed my eyes, and I began to imagine this project.” Ibrahimov, one of the richest men in Azerbaijan, is 54 and has a round, leathery face with millions of tiny creases kneaded in his brow and the spaces beneath his eyes. He walks the way generals walk when they arrive in countries that they have recently occupied. In the middle of his reverie, Ibrahimov summoned the flight attendant. “I asked for some paper, but there wasn’t any. So I grabbed this shirt in my bag that I hadn’t tried on. I took the tissue paper out, and in 20 minutes I drew the whole thing.”
Once he arrived in Baku, Ibrahimov went straight to his architects and said, “Draw this exactly the way I did.” Avesta Concern, the company that governs his various business interests, subsequently commissioned the blueprints for Ibrahimov’s vision. The result will be a sprawling, lobster-shaped development called Khazar Islands — an archipelago of 55 artificial islands in the Caspian Sea with thousands of apartments, at least eight hotels, a Formula One racetrack, a yacht club, an airport and the tallest building on earth, Azerbaijan Tower, which will rise 3,445 feet.
“It will cost $3 billion just to build Azerbaijan Tower,” Ibrahimov said. “Some people may object. I don’t care. I will build it alone. I work with my feelings.”
...while sipping tea, Ibrahimov’s attention was back on Khazar Islands, which he insisted was not modeled after Dubai. “Dubai is a desert,” he said. “The Arabs built an illusion of a country. The Palm” — a faux-island development in Dubai — “is not right. The water smells. Also, they built very deep in the sea. That’s dangerous. The Palm is beautiful to look at, but it’s not good to live in.”
Ibrahimov paused and took a sip of tea. The tiny creases of his face bunched up under his eyes, which looked off into the distance, out the tiny window of the faux log cabin, toward the construction site. He said that he was put off by the inorganic feel of Dubai, the sense that it was so . . . ephemeral. “Everything,” he said dismissively, “is artificial.”
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I have to say, this is a mess...
http://www.azerbaijantower.com/#Home
http://thefabweb.com/?attachment_id=28908
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