saddam’s palaces
Just because it was Saddam Hussein’s palace does not mean that the construction was any good:
[well it seems that the relevant pictures has been removed from the photographer's site. if you've been to egypt, you can imagine what i'm talking about]
It’s exactly the same as the extremely poor construction used for major buildings in Egypt (which probably doesn’t enforce any kind of construction standards or regulations if it even has them), consisting of sand, homemade cement, and might-as-well-have-been-homemade bricks covered by nice layer of disguising paint or sheathing. The palaces look nice and pretty (actually garish and waaay too marbly) on the outside, while inside the walls is a mush of dust, sand, and probably dead things.
The funny thing is that the buildings constructed by the French and British colonialists close to 100 years ago are of higher quality and are more stable than those constructed in the past decade. Go to Cairo and see for yourself; a hammer-blow won’t knock them down.
You’d think a wealthy-as-the-saudis dictator like Saddam Hussein would have been able to afford some solid constructioneers and wall-builders. You’d also think a major country like Egypt would have the types of engineers and professionals that can build good buildings. Alas, in Iraq’s case all that oil money probably went to the army and chemical weapons, while all of the US’s aid to Egypt goes to building more prisons and torture-cells.
[The above picture comes from a beautiful photography series (entitled "Breach") on the current uses of Saddam's palaces by Richard Mosse.]
John said,
2 June 2009 at 10:56 pm
Not to mention that like wealthy-as-the-saudis types are often cheap bastards. Much of the building materials and tools are being funneled/stolen off by the workers themselves in order to compensate for the slave wages that they are paid. Further, the expensive foreign consultants and project managers who are hired to design and build these places are often fired just before the last phase of completion, so that the project can hire in a local “engineer” at a cut rate. The end result is a pretty, one-earthquake-away-from-a-pile-of-rubble piece of crap.
Remember–from your time here–that it doesn’t have to work or actually be of any quality. It just has to look that way. The exterior appearance is the most important part about most of these places, and there is very little consideration given to the actual engineering and construction of the place.
Either way, I’m surprised that the above palace did not crumble into rubble at the first bomb-drop.