It seems like it’s never a good sign when an architect starts talking as though they are an avant-garde sculptor first and one of the types of experts who contribute to the creation of built environments for the purposes of their users second(or just stops talking about that at all).
I have nothing against sculptors, but their work serves a very different set of purposes.
My strong suspicion is that “the line” is, in fact, just a testament to what happens when you are getting high on your own supply and just happen to have effectively unlimited resources to indulge your fantasies; and I’m instinctively cautious of the “aktually, it’s 5D chess!” impulse; but I would be curious if there’s anyone who sees some of the deficiencies as an upside:
I’m led to think of the Versailles palace project, which was expensive and indulgent(though, whether for want of capability or want of imagination, certainly on a fundamentally more practical plan and scale); but also served as a useful tool for transforming the French nobility from potentially dangerous feudal-style vassals who theoretically owed the king all kinds of obligations, but in practice spent a dangerous amount of time hanging out in their local bases of economic, poliitical, and potentially military power; into a courtier class that was drawn to Versailles to get sucked into stupid little court games and squabble over petty distinctions and favors.
If, hypothetically, I needed a gilded cage to store people too wealthy or important to just be disappeared by StateSec or kept in line by squalor and periodic prole beatdowns by the security forces; it seems like I could do worse than a tightly packed city in the middle of a nearly unsurvivable(without deep old school local tribal knowledge or nontrivial modern equipment) patch of nothing; where the accomodations are luxurious but the lunatic logistics means that you are very much encouraged to stay in your opulent penthouse and trade financial services in VR or whatnot most of the time; rather than forming any sort of organic local-scale social and material structures like you get in real cities; and where travel goes from ‘inconvenient’ to ‘impossible’ whenever the ‘smart city’ surveillance grid picks up something worth cracking down on and all mass transit is shut down or reallocated to delivering security forces(probably not culturally resonant to MBS; but I couldn’t resist having the local oppression squads have a theme song that’s the most threatening cover of “I Walk the Line” available, leaning fully into the possessive rather than devoted sense of “because you’re mine; I walk The Line”) to supplement the drone cover.
Again, don’t want to fall into the trap of assuming that a rich asshole’s vanity project must be smarter than it appears because how dare we suspect the competence of those who have proven their ubermench credentials on the field of net worth; but MBS has demonstrated a fair amount of…rough practical competence…when it comes to playing full-contact politics; so it seems at least worth examining the design through the lens of oppression urbanism(which has at least centuries of history to it; remodeling cities to get rid of alley ratways that favor irregulars vs. nice broad streets with good sign lines that favor professional soldiers seems to be a popular one historically; more recent work is a lot more complex because of the elaborations of both surveillance tech and improvements to concealable small arms(including actually-credible anti-armor systems), truck bombs, etc. that favor the irregular opposition.)
In Japan the Tokugawa shoguns kept control over the feudal lords by requiring them to live in the capital every other year.
I think this is the entirety of it. It’s a bunch of childish fantasies of someone who has so much money that no one has ever been willing to contradict him (because he’s surrounded by flunkies). Also the guy has form for murdering people who even mildly question him, so…
Leaving aside that the vision for this city is pretty dystopian (I mean, “cyberpunk” is his stated aesthetic), it’s also an impossible vision. I think everyone involved is well aware that the entire project is a non-starter (seeing some interviews with some architects involved, they almost openly admit it), but they’re being paid millions to indulge in architectural fantasy play. And I think that’s the only group that’s finding benefit in this - the architects and builders who are making money even if nothing gets finished. Because that’s the thing - for this to have use for anyone else, something useful would have to be built, and the plans are impossible in multiple ways. It’s supposed to be the height of the Taipei 101 tower - but that cost 1.8 billion dollars to build a 50 or 60 meter wide tower, and the line would be 340 kilometers (not counting structures between the two walls). So it’s an unprecedented engineering challenge he’s expecting to be built for a small fraction of what it would realistically cost. On top of which, key aspects of the project are being hand-waved in favor of unrealistic fantasies (if they’re even being addressed). Basic things like power, transportation, and other basic infrastructure simply don’t have solutions. (“We’ll invent something magic that will do it” isn’t a solution.) And that’s before you get into “we’ll have more tourists than Paris, more high-tech industry than Silicon Valley, the most cutting-edge biomedical research, levitating flying electric cars, robot maids, holographic teachers, artificial moons, high-temperature ski resorts, etc.” nonsense.
So yeah, they aren’t building this (the money doesn’t exist, the technology doesn’t exist), and people know it. They might build something, but since it won’t be this, what it will be is anyone’s guess. So there’s nothing that anyone else can bank on for their own plans. There might be people in the country naive enough to think it’s possible, who have their own idea about how they could make use of it, but I get the impression they’re outnumbered by people who don’t want to see the entire country’s money spent on this boondoggle, but trying to stop it without getting their heads cut off is tricky business. And as for the architects and builders benefiting, frankly if I were them, I’d be getting nervous right about now. It’s one thing for an insane(ly) rich person to say “Here’s some crazy money to build me the Moon,” and to respond with, “Sure, I’ll work on building you the Moon!” in return. But it’s another thing when he’s irrational and has a history of offing people - eventually he’s going to get pissed when the promised Moon fails to materialize.
Just out of curiosity, is there any ostensible reason it’s supposed to be taller than wide? Having it reach 500 m width instead would give the same volume with a lot less effort, and it’s not like they are trying to preserve the land around it.
I think at least part of the stated reason is about the cooling effect - it’s being built in an increasingly unlivably hot desert, after all - where being taller than wide helps with that. But the actual height isn’t based on anything rational (and even architects involved call it stupid) - the taller it is, the more each square foot costs and the less of the structure that is actually usable, so it’s not about maximizing density to get 9 million people in there (which also is weird and arbitrary…). On some level, being crazy is the point - to be notable, unparalleled. In general the whole thing is so nuts, trying to get rational reasons for things is often pointless.
Basically just Mohammed bin Salman taking the idea of a skyscraper—already a stupidly inefficient thing to build literally anywhere except maybe in densely populated areas where lateral expansion is impossible, like Manhattan—and stretching it to cartoonish extremes.
Yeah. I saw something where one of the architects involved was talking about how he thought the line should be 50 meters tall, which is basically the point beyond which buildings become inefficient (cost per square meter of floor space starts increasing as more and more of the space is wasted and increasingly complicated engineering and construction is necessary). It’s the height to which you build if you want to maximize density and land isn’t super expensive. Making a building 10 times that out in the desert is just being deliberately perverse for the sake of being perverse.
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