Congratulations on your editorial on the Dubai debacle (Leader December 4), here’s hoping it gets up people’s noses. There should be no sympathy for those practices who dashed to the trough to help build a dystopian playground for the super-rich, including such energy-guzzling projects as a revolving hotel

You report one architect as saying: “It was a typically daft development that the developer wanted to pack with apartments and retail.” So why take it on?

Have architects no moral compass at all? Surely this was what John Sorrell meant about architects not getting involved in bad schemes?

Spare a thought instead for the thousands of indentured construction workers brought in from places like Pakistan, paid a pittance and housed in overcrowded and unhygienic barracks. Oh, sorry, I forgot, that has nothing to do with architecture does it?

Louis Hellman, London W3

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Letter to the Editor - 11 December 2009