If a camel is a horse built by a committee, then most cities are camels: ungainly creatures that have evolved over many centuries. But a precious few are thoroughbreds, having sprung, Athena-like, from the mind of one man. Christopher Hawthorne takes the measure of the metropolis built from scratch

In January 2007, four of the most famous architects in the world gathered in a gilded hotel ballroom in Abu Dhabi, the largest of the seven oil-rich city-states that make up the United Arab Emirates, to unveil plans for buildings that rank among the most ambitious of their careers. Zaha Hadid showed models for a wedge-shaped performing arts center. Frank Gehry described plans for his sprawling outpost of the Guggenheim, which at 450,000 square feet is almost five times the size of Frank Lloyd Wright's 1959 original on Fifth Avenue. Japanese modernist Tadao Ando presented a maritime museum with serene forms inspired by the arcing silhouette of the dhow. And Jean Nouvel, the terrifically talented French architect, introduced his design for a branch of the Louvre, which will display paintings and sculpture beneath a giant dome. The four buildings, set to commence construction roughly five years from now, are part of an audacious $27 billion bid to transform Abu Dhabi into a hub for cultural tourism before its oil and natural gas reserves run out near the end of the century.

The elaborate press conference, presided over by Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the architects' patron, generated predictable buzz in the art and architecture worlds and the global press. New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, for instance, gave the project a wholly optimistic and humanistic spin. "With once proud cities like Beirut and Baghdad ripped apart by political conflict bordering on civil war," he wrote, the plan offers "a chance to plant the seeds for a fertile new cultural model in the Middle East."

But it was hardly the chance to engage the cultural history of the region that drew the four architects to Abu Dhabi. The lure, many of them said, was precisely the opposite: the pure tabula rasa potential—the rare chance to design huge, innovative buildings with virtually no budget constraints, no historic-preservation groups to contend with, and no lengthy environmental reviews to endure. Gehry himself, who can be mercifully direct, summed up the opportunity best: "It's like a clean slate in a country full of resources," he said of the plot of land set aside for the new Guggenheim, which is surrounded on three sides by water and on the fourth by desert.

Never have the divisions between autocratic and democratic architecture seemed as stark as they do now. The former comprises the most innovative designs now on the boards or under construction around the world. Along with the Abu Dhabi extravaganza, they include a stadium by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron for the Beijing Olympics that will be wrapped in a tangle of concrete trusses (see "Beijing's New Flame," December 2007); a six-hundred-and-fifty-foot-high translucent tent that British architect Norman Foster is creating for Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, so that residents can "play outdoor tennis, take boat rides, or sip coffee at the pavement cafés," as the BBC put it, even when it's twenty below zero outside; and a raft of dazzling designs for Dubai, Abu Dhabi's leading rival in the race to bring glamour and skyscrapers to the Persian Gulf.