Narchitecture

Kabul, in general, does not have terribly interesting architecture. Most of the buildings are the same shade of gray, because if there is one thing Kabul has a lot of, it is concrete.* The Afghan cultural desire for privacy, coupled with those annoying IEDs, leads just about everyone to build blast/privacy (depending on your point of view) walls in front of their houses, which further obscures most buildings, since Afghans don't usually build much higher than two stories.

And then there are the twin neighborhoods of Sherpur and Wazir Akbar Khan (often referred to jointly as "Wazir"), which are the Kabul equivalents of Central Park West or Beacon Hill. Wazir is where many of the richest people in Kabul (and therefore in Afghanistan) live, which means that many of the houses in the area, regardless of who currently occupies them, have been built by Afghan drug lords, and therefore have earned the moniker "poppy palaces."

Before discussing the downright objectionable design choices that go into these monstrosities, it is worthwhile to say a bit about just how wealthy these...businessmen really are. According to the 2010 UNODC Afghanistan Opium Survey, the national average price for one kilogram of dry opium in 2010 was $169, and the national average yield for opium was about 29.2 kg per hectare.** So an average hectare of land (that's about two and a half acres, for the non-metric folks) produced $4,934.80 in opium revenue for its owner in 2010. In that same year, the per capita GDP in Afghanistan was about $900. A farmer growing opium on a single hectare took in revenue equivalent to over five times the per capita GDP. And the drug lords who live in Wazir are probably bringing in revenue from thousands of hectares each. In a city where locally-grown food costs a few dollars a day, these guys are more or less rolling in cash.

Unfortunately for the eyes of those of us with Western architectural sensibilities, the drug lords seem to be substantially less adept at designing buildings than they are at running drugs. The sense you get driving through Wazir is that the builders of these houses cut out a lot of pictures of Western buildings, stuck them on a wall, and then threw darts at them to pick the different sections of the house. It's like architectural Mad Libs. The only way one could come up with houses like these is if, every time one had to make a design choice, one picked the most incongruous thing one could think of, super-sized it, and then added it.

Unfortunately, I did not bring back pictures of many of my favorite houses--drug lords tend to frown upon people snapping photos of their homes, and most of the time I went by the places I was bouncing around in the back seat of a car anyway. So I cannot bedazzle you with the giant Roman colonnade in front of one house, or the masterful clapboard-shingle-and-poured-concrete siding a few houses down. These pictures, though, give you a pretty good idea of the latest fads in Afghan home-building.

Because, really, when you're the kind of person with a lot of enemies, all of whom probably have large quantities of explosives on hand, there's nothing like a house with huge panes of glass facing the street.


*Some of the many things that Kabul does not have a lot of: wood, stone, marble, or money to buy the previous three things

**Damn you, metric system.