Saudi Arabia’s built landscape is undergoing one of its most radical and spectacular transformations: in just a few years, cities like Riyadh and Jeddah have seen the emergence of skyscrapers, financial districts, transport infrastructures, and new "vision cities" that profoundly redefine the relationship between architecture, territory, and national strategy. This process represents not simply an aesthetic modernization, but an urban and socioeconomic reconfiguration, linked to the national project Saudi Vision 2030. In this article, we analyze some of the most emblematic achievements—and the most visionary ambitions—to explore their meaning, implications, and limits.


Public Investment Fund Tower (PIF Tower)

A new vertical horizon
In the heart of Riyadh stands the Public Investment Fund Tower (PIF Tower), a 385-meter skyscraper completed in 2021, the result of a collaboration between the HOK and Omrania studios. With its 80 floors and over 180,000 square meters of gross floor area, it is the tallest tower in the capital and the second tallest building in the Kingdom after the Jeddah Tower project - still underway. The building is not just an exercise in verticality: its crystalline skin, thanks to a glass and steel facade articulated in faceted planes, evokes the country’s desert geology - in particular the crystalline formations along the wadis.The hexagonal floor plan allows for column-free floors, offering spatial flexibility and variable internal configurations — a significant feature for modern office environments.
This type of architecture embodies a form of pragmatism: it is a symbol of Saudi Arabia’s desire to establish itself as a global financial hub, attract international investment, and build a recognizable urban identity in a rapidly growing metropolitan context.
But verticality is only one side of the coin. The urban fabric is also transforming in terms of infrastructure and mobility. For example, the recent activation of the Riyadh metro network — featuring six lines and 176 km of track — inaugurated, on December 1, 2024, the KAFD Metro Station, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA).



The station, thanks to high-performance concrete panels with a wavy and perforated grid facade, uses passive solar shading and ventilation strategies, reinterpreting formal motifs inspired by desert wind patterns. In this way, the new architecture is not just a vertical spectacle, but a relational infrastructure, capable of supporting densities, movements, and metropolitan functions that are now different from those imagined just a few decades ago.

Megaprojects: the scale of the cube and the line
Beyond its financial heart and infrastructure, Saudi Arabia has launched urban plans on a scale that goes beyond the size of the building: new metropolitan areas are being created, true "smart cities" that seek to rethink the city as a complex, integrated, and self-sufficient organism.


New Murabba

A case in point is New Murabba, a mixed district of approximately 19 km² destined to become a new vital centre of Riyadh.Inside it, the monumental cube known as the Mukaab is planned to be built: a symbolic building, designed as a cubic megastructure measuring approximately 400 metres on each side, which upon completion will likely be the largest built volume in the world.
According to the master plan, the Mukaab would house tens of thousands of residential units, hotels, commercial spaces, offices, entertainment areas, a museum, a university of technology and design, theaters, and numerous cultural spaces; all organized as a "contained city" within a single volume. This approach recalls the idea of a total city: an independent, indoor, regulated and controlled urban organism capable of ensuring mobility, services, and enjoyment in a hostile climate.



At the same time, on the Red Sea coast and in the context of the NEOM project, the linear city model embodied by The Line has been proposed — and partially implemented: approximately 170 km long, a few meters wide and designed without car roads, with internal mobility by rail and pedestrians, powered by renewable energy, and a minimal land footprint.



The Line represents an attempt to reinvent the urban form according to radical logics: vertical density, integrated infrastructure, minimal land consumption and constant interaction with nature. It is an idea that seeks to respond not only to housing and transportation needs, but also to climate, environmental and sustainability challenges.

Financial District, Transportation, and Infrastructure: A Growing City
The set of projects such as PIF Tower, New Murabba, Mukaab, The Line and others signals a coherent plan for urban and infrastructural transformation.The financial district around PIF Tower is conceived as a new global economic hub; the Riyadh Metro reshapes urban flows, while the expansion of residential areas, commercial buildings, universities, and cultural centers translates into concrete form the idea of a contemporary, multifaceted, and interconnected city.

The KAFD Metro Station—with its perforated facade reminiscent of desert geometries and local environmental conditions—is symbolic, demonstrating how sustainable mobility, energy efficiency, and climate comfort are incorporated into design considerations not as ornamentation, but as a functional requirement.
This infrastructural and architectural approach suggests that Saudi Arabia’s transformation is neither simply aesthetic nor exclusively speculative: it is an attempt to redefine the quality of urban life, align economic growth and sustainability, and achieve density, functionality, and modernity in climate contexts that impose real constraints and challenges.

Record ambitions: the future of height
The desire for architectural firsts doesn’t stop at projects already underway: plans for a new skyscraper—the Rise Tower—recently resurfaced, which, if built as intended, could reach 2,000 meters in height, more than double the already ambitious Jeddah Tower and well above the 828 meters of the Burj Khalifa.


Rise Tower, Riyadh

A project of this scale, with hundreds of floors (more than 670 are being talked about), would represent an extreme challenge – not only in engineering terms, but also in urban, social and climatic terms.The fact that the competition attracted international names and leading studios underscores Saudi Arabia’s aspiration to position itself as a global laboratory of architecture and urban planning.
But feasibility remains a key issue: scale, procedures, load management, economic and environmental sustainability, climate and social conditions—everything will have to be measured against reality, not just the rhetoric of the highest.

Urban Visions and Tensions: Between Imagination and Reality
The ensemble of these projects—vertical, horizontal, linear, compact—sometimes evokes an almost utopian architecture, an urban planning of “maximum density and minimum horizontality,” in which living, working, and movement coincide in highly regulated and integrated spaces.
However, this aspiration is not without its challenges. Some projects are experiencing delays, suspensions, or reconsiderations. A prime example is the Jeddah Tower: after years of stalling, construction restarted in 2023; but its completion and actual liveability remain to be determined.
Furthermore, the idea of a “contained city”—like the Mukaab—raises questions about the quality of living, the proper integration between public and private spaces, social control, management of the internal microclimate in such an enormous volume, and maintenance in desert environmental conditions. Can such an intense and concentrated structure truly become a place of sustainable and dignified living?
The challenges for The Line are also many: the radical transformation of the urban form implies the redefinition of mobility methods, social relations, relationship with the territory and natural resources.The risk that many promises will remain on paper—or that the imposed scale will make it difficult to achieve the promoted complexity—is real.

Towards a new urban paradigm
Observing the evolution of recent Saudi architecture, one thing emerges: it is not a matter of isolated, individual works of architecture, but of an integrated system of urban, economic, and governmental ambitions. The construction of skyscrapers and financial districts coexists with mobility plans, urban development, urban rethinking, densification, and, in some cases, radical experiments in reurbanization.
Looking ahead, these projects could define a new paradigm: the city as a complete infrastructure, designed as an organism, capable of responding to contemporary needs for density, mobility, efficiency, identity, and economic diversification. At the same time, their scale and ambition require reflection on sustainability, livability, social equity, and design realism.
If these efforts converge—that is, if the aspirations translate into truly functional, habitable, flexible, and long-lasting spaces—Saudi Arabia could offer one of the most radical and experimental urban models of the 21st century. Otherwise, it risks remaining a laboratory of images, dreams, and grandiose ambitions, incapable of withstanding the test of everyday life.
In any case, the speed, breadth, and variety of these transformations make contemporary Saudi architecture an essential case study for anyone who wishes to understand how new cities, or perhaps new ways of conceiving the city, are being invented today.