Saudi Arabia will construct one of the world’s largest structures spanning for 121 kilometers in width and reaching up to 488 meters in height in the desert city of Neom.
Neom is a hyper-futuristic city envisioned by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. The skyscraper project has been named the ‘Mirror Line’ and is expected to cost $1 trillion.
Once fully constructed, the Mirror Line will start from the Gulf of Aqaba and bisect a mountain range which extends alongside the coastline. It will continue through a mountain resort and a complex which will be home to the Saudi Arabian government, while passing through an ‘aerotropolis’ in Saudi Arabia’s desert plains, the Wall Street Journal said in a report.
The skyscrapers will be made of mirrored glass.
Neom is a carbon-zero city built like linearly and will be 170-km long, similar to the size of the US state of Massachusetts. The city will be owned by the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund. The Crown Prince wants the city to be a destination for foreign investment as well as center for new jobs.
The NEOM website says that the two buildings will be connected via walkways and boasts that any location within the city will be accessible via a five-minute walk and the longest journey will be a maximum of 20 minutes.
One of the unique features of the Mirror Line will be its eight-sided buildings. It will contain a mountain resort and a suspended sports complex, a marina to dock yachts and will have vertical farming integrated into the building to feed the five million people it intends to house.
The US-based Morphosis Architects are designing the Mirror Line. It also involves nine other design and engineering consultants including Canada-based WSP Global and New York’s Thornton Tomasetti.
The Wall Street Journal report says that the 2,600-foot-long structures that will connect along a line will have varying heights of up to 1,600-feet and will be higher than the Empire State Building in New York.
A high-speed rail will run underneath the buildings. Most of it will be connected by walkways.
MBS claimed that the project will be ready by 2030 but some engineers say it could take almost half a century to be completed.
Some reports have said that the structure will have to be constructed in parts. MBS first revealed the idea in 2021 while wishing to build a city with no cars and zero pollution.
“The Line is a project that is a civilizational revolution that puts humans first," Crown Prince Salman said while unveiling the project in January 2021.
(with inputs from Wall Street Journal)
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