It’s my understanding that a lot of the slums in Bombay move around with big construction projects.
Legal slums are built to house the construction workers and their families. Then an illegal slum starts to grow from the legal one, with people selling tea and food for the workers arriving, then people who provide other goods and services arriving. Eventually a small town has formed with the main source of (external) income being the construction workers jobs.
Don’t know if that’s what happened here (and of course after the project’s finished the slums are often pulled down and the people forced to move) but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Weird. The thing is brand new and cost more than Belgium, but it already looks like a twenty year old abandoned project squatted by nihilist crack addicts.
I dunno who the architect is, but he oughta be worked over with a tire iron.
With a health club and all the other assorted stuff in this house… it’s got to employ a lot of staff, which is good, and one almost thinks it’d be opened as a club, either to private members or to the public who can afford to go there…
Found the Wikipedia entry for the building, which is called Antilia. 600 full-time staff members. That’s a lot of people employed. It almost sounds like it must function, partially, as business offices?
If I had that kind of money, I’d try to find an old palace or other large house and hire artisans to restore the place. I prefer older architecture to most modern stuff. (Richard Jenrette is an investor who has done this with a dozen historic houses here in the US.)
It looks not unlike the kinds of crap I used to draw when I was 10, thought I could be a gazillionaire when I grew up, and had no taste, so yeah, that’s still entirely possible.
Of course, I don’t know if it has the one thing that I always figured I’d have in my ultimate mansion: a reel-to-reel tape system.
There was actually a fair amount of outrage over this building in India too. However a couple of points; it’s nearly impossible to place a tall building in Bombay out of sight of the slums which are nearly everywhere. This building is one of the most exclusive areas in the city surrounded by lots of other similar buildings. And while the design looks very odd, the point is to create space for some rather fabulous-looking rooftop gardens. IMO it’s a very impressive and innovative design; check out this threadat Skyscraper City with pictures of what the final building will look like.
But yeah, Mukesh Ambani would gain a lot more respect if he emulated Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and used his billions to fund a charitable foundation.
Oof. De gustibus non est disputandum, I guess. I agree with the poster that said it looks like a stack of books covered in moss. No thanks. I have no problems with the roof gardens or the green design, but the building itself is hideous. There’s this horrible brutalist vibe to it that reminds me of leaky, aging municipal buildings and tenements (which, I guess, fits in with the slum).
Well, there’s that, plus the stunning narcissism on display. Ick.