Behold, the “Sky Stadium” announced by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as the latest jazzy edition to their utopian “smart city” project known as The Line or NEOM — an $8-trillion, 105-mile-long megastructure composed of two 1640-foot-high mirrored slabs that enclose a creamy nougat center of jungly foliage and water features integrated with apartments, offices, schools, and (of course) shopping. It’s completely insane, you understand. The Line was first featured on this site in August 2022. Three years on, the project is buckling under the weight of its psychotic grandiosity. Here’s a cross-section of the The Line’s beginning at the Persian Gulf:
Here’s another schematic angle on The Line to appreciate how it shoots straight out into the Arabian Desert:
The 46,000-seat Sky Stadium will be perched 1,150-feet up and is slated to be completed in time for the 2034 Fifa football (soccer) World Cup. The initial A-I generated renderings at the top of the page show it suspended on a skyscraper above a sprawling city, but it is actually designed to be “nested” somewhere between the two slabs of The Line.
First announced in 2017 as part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 diversification push, The Line was envisioned as a futuristic “cognitive city” with vertical urbanism, AI integration, 100-percent renewable energy (solar power), and 95-percent land preservation of its barren surroundings in the Tabuk province, “for nature.”
Dunno about you, but I’d be a little nervous about watching a soccer game 1,150-feet above the desert floor. Sounds like a super-gigantic version of one of those Sky Bridge” failures of the 1990s, where a mere hundred drunken people swilling margaritas collapse a hanging architectural folly in a Shopping Mall. We’ll stand by for the halftime show there.
Shout out to Warren McEwan for nominating this humdinger !!!
I’d just LOVE to wait in line with 46,000 people ahead of me for the elevator.
Twice!
I am sure the will be inhuman treatment of the labor force involved as well.