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Featured Work, Middle East, Travel - Jul 24, 2010 18:44 - 0 Comments

Mada’in Saleh: Arabian Rock Stars

Discovery Channel Magazine, August 2010Abdul Azizforwebsite

Deep in the deserts of Saudi Arabia sits one of the great archaeological marvels of the Middle East: Mada’in Saleh. Like Petra in Jordan – carved by the same ancient tribe, the Nabateans – the site is made up of hundreds of tombs and facades carved deep into the surface of golden sandstone rock, showing incredible precision and artistry for a people who lived 2,000 years ago.

But there’s one major difference between Mada’in Saleh and Petra, or Palmyra, or Persepolis, or any of the region’s great historic treasures: there’s no-one there. No tourists, no touts, no tour buses. Foreigners rarely come because it’s so hard to get visas; Saudis tend to view the tombs with some superstition. In an entire day at the site, I saw perhaps a dozen people. And that is part of the charm.

To see the article as it ran in Discovery, with photography, follow this link: Medain S’aleh (2)

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Australia, Big Interviews, Featured Work, Travel, Turkey - Jul 24, 2010 18:16 - 0 Comments

The Australian Way: Boulder & The Beautiful

The Australian Way, August 2010rhythmoflifeforwebsite

On a glorious limestone hillside in Turkey’s Cappadocia, Andrew Rogers is supervising a team of 50 local carvers hewing the steps of an amphitheatre out of the earth. Beneath them, workers with a crane are hoisting a pillar of rock the height of a four-storey building off the back of a groaning truck. These are the final stages of a vast artistic endeavour four and a half years in the making, and you can see it all from the amphitheatre’s steps: 10 stone-wall and basalt sculptures extending two and a half kilometres down the valley, so big you can see them from space.

This is Time and Space, a collection of geoglyphs, or land art, and it is creativity on an epic scale. The installation in Cappadocia is big – 10,500 tons of stone, seven kilometres of rock walls – but not unique, for this is the 12th location in which Melbourne-based Rogers has worked: 40 sculptures built by 5,500 pairs of hands on five continents, from Iceland to Slovakia, Bolivia to the Gobi Desert, Chile to Geelong. In sum, it is easily the largest contemporary artistic installation in the world.

See this article is it ran here: qa0810_Landscape.indd

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Big Interviews, Economics, Featured Work, Foreign Exchange, From the Vault, Malaysia, Politics - Oct 1, 2007 9:52 - 0 Comments

Mahathir Mohamed, Emerging Markets, October 2007

With MahathirEmerging Markets, October 2007

Putrajaya is a curious place. Though few outside of Malaysia have heard of it, it is the country’s federal administrative centre, founded in 1995 to take the government departments out of nearby Kuala Lumpur. It’s a place of resplendent architectural daring: mosques, palaces, convention centres, and five extraordinary bridges over a 650-hectare man-made lake. But the most striking thing about it is this: there’s no-one there.

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