(Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl believed Azerbaijan was the site of an ancient civilisation where Vikings originated.) She takes me to see two of her installations at the Yarat Contemporary Art Centre. Tattoos on her ankle depict rock carvings in the Gobustan Preserve. “It has become a small Dubai.” Ibrahimova is proud of her heritage. “Baku was a small Paris,” artist and social activist Sitara Ibrahimova tells me when we meet. And though two of the three Flame Towers have yet to fill with many tenants beyond a Lamborghini dealership, they have become Baku’s new signature, overtaking the millennium-old World Heritage site known as Maiden Tower, once part of the city’s fortifications. A low, tubular building designed to resemble a rolled-up rug, the Azerbaijan Carpet Museum is the wittiest building in town. To the west, on the waterfront, sits another showstopper. Viewed from any angle you would swear it’s in motion, its undulating whiteness rising to a peak and slowly rippling down the other side. None of those give the swooping building, which the late Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid considered a dream project, its due. ![]() The Heyday Aliyev Center has been compared to a whale, a glacier, and an airport terminal. (One architectural project in particular has received attention in recent times: the involvement of America’s First Family in a flashy hotel and condo project being built by an Azeri family said to be close to the Aliyevs.) But Ilham Aliyev’s most effective marketing tool has been architecture, from an ultramodern airport to shiny sports venues, a grand war memorial, and shopping malls that look like spaceships. ![]() Many of the world’s luxury hotel brands, including Four Seasons, Fairmont, Jumeirah, and Hyatt Regency, have acquired Baku outposts. Baku has hosted the World Chess Olympiad, the European Games, and the Eurovision Song Contest (even though Azerbaijan isn’t technically in Europe) staged Formula 1 Grand Prix races and made bids, unsuccessful, for the Olympics. President Ilham Aliyev-who succeeded his father, Heydar, a former Politburo leader who governed Azerbaijan as though still in the U.S.S.R.-runs the nation like a Persian Gulf emir, using government money, of which there is plenty when oil prices run high, to nudge it into the world’s consciousness. Even as Baku’s two million-plus residents struggle to define themselves, they live in a place that looks like nowhere else. Now the Aliyev family, which has presided over Azerbaijan since 1993, has applied a new level of ambition to the construction: Additions such as the swooping Heydar Aliyev Centre and the triad of curved, glass-sheathed skyscrapers known as the Flame Towers are headed toward iconic status. From the domed 15th-century Palace of the Shirvanshahs (named for the rulers of Shirvan, a onetime Azeri state) to the ornate fin de siècle mansions of the first oil boom, to the muscular office blocks built by the Soviet Union, those architectural gestures make rounding each corner a potential moment of discovery. The Caspian Sea waterfront must compel grand architectural gestures because Baku’s rulers always have been partial to them. The turbulence is playing out in what can only be called an epic setting.
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