Neom

Grey Havoc

Grey Havoc

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I'm pretty sure we had a topic on this already, but it has gone MIA.

www.wsj.com

Saudi Crown Prince’s Vision for Neom, a Desert City-State, Tests His Builders

The $500 billion project is intended to help lure foreign investors and diversify Saudi Arabia’s oil-dependent economy, but it is mired in delays and dealing with an employee exodus.
www.wsj.com www.wsj.com


A story on it from 2019 (the project was first unveiled in 2017):
www.wsj.com

A Prince’s $500 Billion Desert Dream: Flying Cars, Robot Dinosaurs and a Giant Artificial Moon

Saudi Arabia’s crown prince turned to U.S. consultants for help imagining a massive new city-state in the northwest of his kingdom. What emerged was a Jetsons-style world of automation.
www.wsj.com www.wsj.com

From last year:
www.wsj.com

Saudi Crown Prince Barrels Ahead With Big Projects to Boost Economy

The kingdom is moving forward with multibillion-dollar plans to build cities despite the Covid-19 pandemic and depressed oil prices, betting that projects closely associated with the crown prince will kick-start its economic recovery.
www.wsj.com www.wsj.com
 
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I fully support the Saudi royals spending every last dime they have working on making this happen:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyWaax07_ks


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As William Gibson has often said, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. In this case the distribution is really messy and we're getting bits of the future from alternate timelines. The Line has its precedent in the work of constructivism, a radical early 20th century Russian and then early Soviet style. In particular, linear cities proposed by the Communist Part official Nikolai Milyutin and the architect Ivan Leonidov (among others) circa 1930. This one's in (ahem) line with Soviet megaprojects.

thecharnelhouse.org

Leonidov, Ivan (Russian architect, 1902-1959) Culture Russian Title Linear City Project for Magnitogorsk Work Type Urban design Date 1930 Style Period Constructivist

Visit the post for more.
thecharnelhouse.org

mitp-arch.mitpress.mit.edu

Introduction

mitp-arch.mitpress.mit.edu mitp-arch.mitpress.mit.edu

In the 1960s, radical architecture groups with names like Archigram, Archizoom, Ant Farm, Superstudio etc. proposed similar megaprojects but this time around it was as satire or provocation. They used the techniques of pop art a lot, staging happenings, and presenting their projects in formats that mimicked magazines and advertising. Superstudio's Non-Stop City and the Continuous Monument (1969-70) are is the closest analogues.

www.archdaily.com

The Return of Superstudio and the Anti-Architecture Ideology

Superstudio's radical ideas and their anti-design movement is sparking a recursive trend of architecture professionals whose work is never built.
www.archdaily.com www.archdaily.com

speculativeedu.eu

The Radical Design Movement - SpeculativeEdu

More essential history for Speculative Design by Michael Smyth.
speculativeedu.eu speculativeedu.eu


Screen Shot 2022-08-26 at 1.20.16 PM.png

Today, I'd say that the most direct descendents are (were in his case, alas) Lebbeus Woods (who stuck to paper projects) and OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), founded by Rem Koolhaas. It gets a lot of stuff built, but not quite on this scale. 'Oma' is also Dutch for 'Granny.'

You might think it's weird seeing Neom proposed. I think it's doubly weird seeing MBS proposing it with utter seriousness. It's as if the British Government really did establish a Ministry of Silly Walks and gave it the budget of the MoD.
 
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Travel The Line from end to end in 20 minutes.... all 170km of it? That's 600km/h or 375mph.
No train goes at that speed so what have they got in mind, one of the Hyperloop vacuum tube train setups? :D:rolleyes:
 
Nick said:
Travel The Line from end to end in 20 minutes.... all 170km of it? That's 600km/h or 375mph.
No train goes at that speed so what have they got in mind, one of the Hyperloop vacuum tube train setups? :D:rolleyes:
Click to expand...
Wouldn't surprise me.
 
It might be cheaper to link South America to the Antarctic spur. Dead oil derricks perhaps very slowly towed under the waves and stood up every 10 miles…stand up and fill in over time. Air and sea current power…pump fresh water through pipes north to Chile and Argentina.
 
publiusr said:
It might be cheaper to link South America to the Antarctic spur. Dead oil derricks perhaps very slowly towed under the waves and stood up every 10 miles…stand up and fill in over time. Air and sea current power…pump fresh water through pipes north to Chile and Argentina.
Click to expand...
WTF??
 
www.reuters.com

Saudi Arabia wins bid to host 2029 Asian Winter Games at NEOM

Saudi Arabia said on Tuesday it has won a bid to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games at a planned mountain resort in the Gulf Arab state's $500 billion flagship NEOM project.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com

www.insidethegames.biz

Planned Saudi Arabia resort Trojena awarded 2029 Asian Winter Games

The yet-to-be-built Saudi resort of Trojena has been rubber-stamped as the host for the 2029 edition of the Asian Winter Games at the Olympic Council...
www.insidethegames.biz www.insidethegames.biz


www.theguardian.com

Saudi Arabia to host 2029 Asian Winter Games at desert megacity

Saudi Arabia said on Tuesday it has won a bid to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games at a planned mountain resort in the Gulf Arab state’s $500 billion flagship Neom project
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
publiusr said:
It might be cheaper to link South America to the Antarctic spur. Dead oil derricks perhaps very slowly towed under the waves and stood up every 10 miles…stand up and fill in over time. Air and sea current power…pump fresh water through pipes north to Chile and Argentina.
Click to expand...

Quoting Lew Grade 'It would be cheaper to lower the Atlantic'.....
 
A bit more context on megastructures.

www.bbc.com

Will we ever… live in city-sized buildings?

The cities of science fiction are frequently portrayed as all-encompassing and self-contained structures, but how feasible is it to build a colossal city in a building?
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com

Paolo Soleri coined the term 'arcology' as a portmanteau of 'architecture' and 'ecology' and actually considered his concepts for gigantic structure as miniaturisation - that is, reducing as much as possible the physical and ecological footprints of cities. It stands in stark contrast with Frank Lloyd Wright's 'Broadacre City' concept, which embraced urban sprawl as a way of 'thinning' the impact of cities.

Arcologies are not simply Blade Runner style mega-skyscrapers, but exploit their concentration in the manner of termite colonies, which have very sophisticated thermal, ventilation and even agricultural systems. If you like, they'd be grounded O'Neill colonies.

Neom to me seems more in the Blade Runner mould, a deadly earnest version of the Superstudio and Archigram satires. JG Ballard must be laughing in his grave.

en.wikipedia.org

High-Rise (novel) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

en.wikipedia.org

High-Rise (film) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

By the way, the first true arcology in fiction is the Last Redoubt in William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land, first published in 1912, long predating Soleri. HP Lovecraft was a huge fan and its got plenty of related resources online just a few clicks away.
 
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news.slashdot.org

Saudi Arabia's Sci-Fi Megacity Is Well Underway - Slashdot

Mark Harris writes via MIT Technology Review: In early 2021, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia announced The Line: a "civilizational revolution" that would house up to 9 million people in a zero-carbon megacity, 170 kilometers long and half a kilometer high but just 200 meters...
news.slashdot.org
 
Now, the wind at either end of this thing could power quite the wind turbine.

Hmm…would this interrupt winds to arch-enemy Iran and cause a rain shadow effect—greening their desert?
 
Neom's Line is a 170km long city that is no wider than a city block. It's extreme shape runs along transportation networks and promises an efficient and futuristic urban design and lifestyle. However, Linear cities have been around for more than a hundred years, yet they are rarely built. Why not? Why are lines not considered great shapes for cities? From poor access to public transportation to a lack of social cohesion, linear cities can suffer from a number of issues that make them less livable than more traditional, compact urban forms. This video breaks down the top reasons linear cities have either failed or not been built, despite dozens of proposals since their invention in the late 1800s.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHRMcwQHicI
 
Sure looks like some mbs is taking the Strassendorf/One Street Town concept to its highly illogical conclusion just in order to sit with the cool popular Belt and Road Initiative kids...
 
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Superstudio et al. were being satirical, so it appears that contra Marx, history will repeat as a farce and then again as a tragedy. If JG Ballard were alive today, I wonder what he'd make of it (the poster for the film adaptation of High-Rise rather cleverly refers to the poster for A Clockwork Orange).
 

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"Neom - né homme, MBS est maintenant inhumain."

"... when my eyes were stabbed, by the flash of Neom lights / that ruin the night"
 
Some zingers:

It is a city that might have been conceived by WeWork’s founder Adam Neumann in consultation with FTX boss Sam Bankman-Fried, with the benefit of management advice from Elon Musk.

like Putin’s generals, bin Salman’s architects wouldn’t want to bring their boss bad news.

It comes as no surprise to find that Boris Johnson is an enthusiast for Neom.

Architecture generally offers practitioners a longer career than most creative professions. But there is something about the nature of the particular selection of architects who have been gathered to build Neom that suggests a supergroup of ageing rockers getting together to go on the road one last time for the sake of their pensions. Most of the best-known architects involved are from a generation that began working in the 1960s. These are the boomers who once revelled in causing disruption and abandoning conventions, and who have thrived on becoming celebrities.

Authoritarians have a deep-seated and well-founded suspicion of conventional cities: they are troublesome places given to insubordination, and uncontrollable. They like to build new capitals far from dissenters—as the military did for the Myanmar regime in the early 2000s with Naypyidaw.

The most likely outcome of the efforts of bin Salman’s diggers in the desert is a scattering of monumental fragments, part occupied, and made to operate in makeshift ways, rather than being fully completed. William Gibson once memorably described Singapore as Disneyland with the death penalty. He might have been thinking of Neom.

Ouch!

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk

Welcome to Neom, Saudi Arabia’s desert dystopia in the making

Western architects are scrambling to work on a Saudi Arabian dream: a city founded on a 170km-long line of mirrored towers. But will it end up as a se...
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk www.prospectmagazine.co.uk
 
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A lonnng time back, but I vaguely remember a 'Linear City' concept from West Germany that put Autobahn on roof, trams / 'Light Rail' inside...

Surrounded by park-land, everything you'd need within a short walk / lift to tram stop, then a 15~~20 mins ride.

Snag, beyond enough concrete & rebar for Hoover Dam or five, was no-one could believe the planned vibration isolation from Autobahn would actually work. Also, you had to build about a dozen miles of the mega-town to have the necessary facilities to persuade people to move in...

Shades of recent Chinese cities that got started during their property boom, now lay empty and decaying...
 
We've seen what happens when an airliner hits a skyscraper. This thing is as tall as a skyscraper, but many miles long... it'll be an *easy* target. The question: if it gets plowed by an Emirates A380, or someone detonates a 2 kiloton suitcase nuke, or a few hundred tons of something flammable/explosive gets collected and set off, or just the final end-stage of tofu dreg construction finally kicks in... will the resulting collapse *stop* or will it domino down the whole length in either direction? Some sort of rip-stops seems logical, but then the whole thing is anti-logical.

So imagine you're at home in Mile 40 when you hear that a collapse started at Mile 80, and it's progressing along at 20 miles per hour. You have 2 hours before the collapse gets to you. But you Own Nothing And You're Happy, so you have no vehicle of your own. All you have is public transport, which is:
1) Partially not working due to power grid failure
2) Massively overloaded with everyone from upstream trying to get out.

So you can't take a bus, you can't take a train. There aren;t enough helicopters to rescue the billionares from the roof, never mind your piddly ass. Your best bet is to leave the Line directly, through the occasional (and locked) doors at the base. You know, you and a few million other people heading out into the scorching desert while a wall half a kilometer tall collapses right behind you. Have fun with that.

The long pile of concrete, steel and glass rubble, the burial site of millions, will become one *hell* of a monument.

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
 
It is a city that might have been conceived by WeWork’s founder Adam Neumann in consultation with FTX boss Sam Bankman-Fried, with the benefit of management advice from Elon Musk.
Click to expand...
Got a great WTF moment before I realized the "might". Almost chocked in laughter afterwards. Outch - well said.
 
GTX said:
Orionblamblam said:
will the resulting collapse *stop* or will it domino down the whole length in either direction?
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I fail to see how it would "domino down".
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Imagine a skyscraper collapsing. Then imagine it was nailed to another skyscraper. The first would have a tendency to yank the second down. When the second goes down, it pulls down the third.

If skyscrapers are separated, one collapsing doesn't do much to the next one. But if they are all connected, it *could* be like watching the Tacoma Narrows bridge peeling itself apart... especially if it was built with the sort of tofu dreg construction we could well see out of Neom. The Line isn't a normal multi-story building... it's meant to be *gigantic.* 200 meters wide, 500 meters tall. That sort of height, especially filled with tall the open spaces and trains and whatnot they're saying, mean that it will be sort of bleeding edge construction. You can tear up a standard five story apartment building and not have the destruction spread, because the buildings are not under that much stress to begin with. but a structure more than half a kilometer tall? Nah. The illustrations show it to be basically two relatively thin parallel walls, 500 meter tall, 200 meters apart, with *stuff* in between them. That's just *begging* for something to go wrong.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8YdMhCEqsQ


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zi_ctdK35U


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8ZmOgMlyRE
 
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Considering the widespread scepticism about the Neom projects, of which The Line is best known, Shelley's poem 'Ozymandias' springs to mind.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

'Ozymandias' is derived from the 'throne name' of the Pharaoh we know today as Ramesses II or Ramesses the Great. Pharoahs had 'throne names' as modern Popes choose their names. His was Usimaatre Setepenre Ramese Meryamun. Roughly translated, that means Strong in the enforcement of justice as Ra, Chosen of Ra, Made in the likeness of Ra, Beloved of Amun. For all the accusations of megalomania, his reign lasted an incredible 67 years and was marked by relative peace and great prosperity. Mere streaks of good luck don't last that long. Another reason for the massive image-building of his reign was that his dynasty succeeded that of Akhenaten, who was an extremely divisive figure, so ensuring the appearance of stability was imperative. Though Ramesses portrayed in propaganda as a conquerer, his real skills were political and diplomatic and he's credited with negotiating one of the world's first peace treaties with the Hittite Empire. It actually worked. If you want to meet him in person, he's in residence at the new Grand Egyptian Museum.

His nickname was 'Sese' a diminutive of 'Ramese' (like 'Bob' to 'Robert'). Egypt's current president is Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Hmmmm...

Anyway, contra Shelley, he is certainly not forgotten. Will history think so highly of MBS? Also hmmmm...

Akhenaten is often called the world's first monotheist. He established the cult of Aten, the sun-disc as the state religion of Egypt. Egypt is currently building a new capital, as yet unnamed. Akhenaten built the city of Akhetaten ('Horizon of the Sun') as his capital (and Ramesses II built Pi-Ramese as his). It's site is on the Nile, now known as Armana. Some of the graphics associated with this new museum refer to the symbol of the Aten. Egypt, as an Islamic country, would probably rather have a monotheistic 'brand', so we might see more of this. The logo design for the new capital is based on a building obviously representing the sun on the horizon while the plan of the Grand Museum is based on spreading rays.

So, two Pharaohs, both dead for well over three thousand years, and modern kings are trying to match them today in their building. Julius Caesar or Augustus? Pah! Upstarts!
 

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But in a paper published in June in npj Urban Sustainability, mathematician Rafael Prieto-Curiel and physicist Dániel Kondor, both at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH), argue that the Line is not particularly sustainable from a mathematical perspective. “A line is the least efficient possible shape of a city," Prieto-Curiel said in a press release about the research from CSH. He added that, instead, cities are typically round.

www.scientificamerican.com

Mathematicians Think Saudi Arabia’s Ambitious ‘Line’ City Should Be a Circle

Despite efforts to make a planned city in the Saudi Arabian desert sustainable, its layout could create problems
www.scientificamerican.com www.scientificamerican.com
 
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