When Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered authorities to develop the lands in his country’s arid northwest, he demanded something as ambitious as the pyramids.
What the city planners brought to him in response to his request was a plan for the construction of the largest building in the world: two buildings of variable height that reach almost 500 meters at their peak, built in parallel along 120 kilometers in a straight line that starts at the beach and crosses coastal, mountainous and desert land, and is connected by paths, as can be learned From hundreds of pages of secret planning documents that explain the concept for the first time in detail.
The project – known as the “Line of Sight” – builds on an earlier announcement by Prince Mohammed of plans to create a community in the shape of a line, expected to cost up to a trillion dollars and house about five million people when completed, according to people familiar with the plans and documents seen by The Wall Street Journal.
A high-speed train will operate under the mirror-clad buildings, according to documents prepared last fall. In order to feed the residents, a vertical farm integrated into the buildings is planned in the project. For entertainment, the line of sight will include a stadium up to 300 meters above the ground. It will also have a marina for yachts under the arch that will connect the two buildings.
The skyline is one of a series of high-profile projects that make up Neom, a Massachusetts-sized real estate project driven by Prince Mohammed to diversify the kingdom’s economy away from its reliance on oil. The city is owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and is expected to attract foreign investment. and create thousands of jobs.
But raising interest and capital in foreign countries has been difficult in the meantime, and many Western countries and companies are boycotting the kingdom and Prince Mohammed, the de facto leader, because of Saudi Arabia’s poor human rights record after the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in 2018.
Last week, this isolation came to an end after the highly publicized visit of US President Joe Biden, which may pave the way for more foreign investment to be invested in the speech.
The kingdom enjoys record revenues
Beyond that, the kingdom is also enjoying record revenues due to global oil prices, which have allowed Prince Mohammed to move forward with ambitious projects such as the line of sight intended to make his country one of the most desirable destinations in the world – although plans for the project are still subject to change.
If Saudi Arabia succeeds in building the project, there will be no similar structure in the entire world. It is already challenging the city planners who sketch it. Among other things, they have a target date to complete the project by 2030 which is the target date of the Prince’s national transformation plan and they still have to solve many problems, such as managing migration routes of millions of birds that the line of sight crosses.
An assessment of the initial impact of the line of sight produced in January 2021 stated that the project would have to be built in stages and its construction could take 50 years. Naom workers voiced concerns in the document that people would not want to live in an environment of skyscrapers after a plague and that the sheer size of the structure would change the flow of groundwater in the mountain wadis and limit the movement of birds and other animals.
The Line of Sight plans are reminiscent of the period of property acquisition before the global financial crisis in neighboring Dubai, a city that Prince Mohammed praised for the speed and ambition of its projects. In the Emirates, they built the tallest tower in the world at a height of 823 meters, an island in the shape of a palm tree with villas and apartments, and a cluster of artificial islands built to resemble a world map.
But like Dubai, not all planned projects in Saudi Arabia will be built. In the recent oil boom, Saudi Arabia planned to build the world’s tallest skyscraper, then froze the project. The speech has already undergone several cycles of outline plans and foreign workers leaving the country are harming the pace of development and management culture, the Wall Street Journal previously reported.
The line of sight was designed by the American firm Morphosis Architects, founded by Pritzker Prize winner Thom Main, and includes at least nine other design and engineering consulting firms, including Montreal-based WSP Global and New York-based Thornton Tomasetti, among others. They proposed building the project in stages by creating 800 meter long buildings that would connect along a line, at varying heights that reach 300 meters at their peak, higher than the Empire State Building.
Morphosis did not respond to requests for comment. WSP and Thornton Tomasetti chose not to comment.
“Going for something that has never been done before”
“They’re going for something that’s never been done before,” said Javier Quintana de Una, director general of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Living, a Chicago-based nonprofit.
If completed, the line of sight will extend from the Gulf of Aqaba and cross a mountain range that runs parallel to the coast. The building will continue east through a mountain resort and a complex that will house the Saudi government to the “Eurotropolis,” an aerial city on the desert plains, planning documents show.
The 170 km long plan is known as ‘The Line’. It is an idea that has interested city planners for more than a hundred years. In 1882, the Spanish architect Arturo Soria y Mata proposed to build an elongated urban project that later inspired the Ciudad Lineal district in Madrid.
Prince Mohammed first revealed in January 2021 his idea for a city in the shape of a line, without cars and with zero air pollution. In the video, he frames this idea as the development of humanity’s achievements, such as the discovery of penicillin and the moon landing, and as a way to save lives that would be lost to pollution and traffic accidents.
“The line is a project that will be a cultural revolution that puts humans at the forefront,” he says in the video.
“I want to build my pyramids”
Just one year earlier, several human rights groups had criticized the project for uprooting tribes from their lands by force, including a case where security forces killed one resident. In the video, Mohammed says the line should allow a million residents to meet each day within a five-minute walk and travel from end to end in 20 minutes. The project is supposed to be powered by renewable energy and protect the pristine nature in the northwest of the country. More details will be provided later, says Muhammad in the video. At the beginning of the project, the urban planners envisioned separate communities to be built along the ‘line’.
But in a private meeting, the prince told people working on the line to think boldly about architecture, saying “I want to build my own pyramids,” the Wall Street Journal reported last year.
City planners thought about how to increase the population of the line up to 6 million people, including 5 million who will live in the buildings of the line of sight, as can be learned from the documents. To feed people, vegetables will be “autonomously harvested and packaged” and delivered to “community cafeterias” and “community kitchens,” the documents show. Residents will pay a subscription fee to receive breakfast, lunch and dinner.
One of the biggest challenges for a structure made of two tall buildings running parallel to each other is the shadow that will be created. The lack of sunlight can be harmful to health, the documents say.
The project also faces one unique challenge that is not found anywhere else: the curvature of the earth.
Because the ground is curved about 20 centimeters every kilometer and a half, the documents say, the planners suggest leaving spaces at the top of the 800-meter-long modules so that the structures can be “bent” around the Earth.
Stephen Kalin participated in the preparation of the article.