Saudi Arabia‘s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman and several architects involved in the kingdom’s ambitious project The Line say it is “very doable” and “possible”.
The Line is a zero-carbon city with “vertically layered” buildings for work, living and leisure. It is located in Saudi’s $500 billion Neom giga-project.
Mohammed bin Salman and architects from six studios discussed the development in a Discovery Channel documentary titled The Line: Saudi Arabia’s City of the Future in Neom.
“They say a lot of projects in Saudi Arabia can’t be done, they’re too ambitious,” Mohammed bin Salman said (via Dezeen). “They can keep saying that and we can keep proving them wrong.”
In the documentary, he added: “We have the models now, we work on it, it sounds very doable, the idea is amazing.
“It’s massive. It’s huge. It’s a project making money, it’s a project absorbing demand that we assumed in Saudi Arabia, and it’s something that creates the new way of building cities and a new way of living.”
According to the documentary (via Dezeen), the futuristic city will be divided into 140 modules, each at 800 metres long and housing 80,000 people.
“We as architects and urbanists have to think differently about everything,” said Michael Bischoff, partner at Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, in the Discovery Channel documentary.
“We can keep proving them wrong”
“It is inspiring to take things that we’ve seen happening in sci-fi and say, is it really sci-fi? Or is it really the world, that’s what is at the heart of this.”
Thom Mayne, founding parter at Morphosis, said: “I can’t think of anybody that wouldn’t want to be part of this project, it’s going to be, without a question, the single most extraordinary piece of work that begins in the first quarter of the 21st century.”
Last week, Bloomberg reported that Neom is looking to raise a 10 billion riyal ($2.7bn) loan. The project will be 33 times the size of New York City, and nearly the size of Belgium.
“The questions and the threat on our planet is so immense that I really don’t understand that we try to answer these questions with old answers,” said LAVA co-founder Alexander Rieck in the documentary.
Reinier de Graaf, partner at OMA, said: “My immediate reaction was, what the hell is this?”
“As soon as you start to get into it, you start to sort of think about the possibilities of it. And your mind starts to sort of begin to imagine that, yeah, it is maybe possible,” said HOK design pricipal Roger Soto.
