Since we last checked in on the megaproject/arcology beat, there has been some progress on the new NEOM linear city rising from the sands of Saudi Arabia. Contracts have been awarded, new towns have been developed for workers, and excavation continues apace. You can enjoy their most recent promotional video here.
More than just staging and construction moving forward, several other projects have been brought under the NEOM umbrella. NEOM, the project’s name, is the first three letters of the ancient Greek prefix, neo, meaning new. The fourth letter is the abbreviation of an Arabic word, Mostaqbal, meaning future. The additional projects added to NEOM include a new seaport called Oxagon, an island resort called Sindalah, and a mountain ski city called Trojena. They are all complex in size, engineering, and audacity. But because they’re being built on sparsely populated lands far away, they kind of float untethered in space.
Just for fun, and to offer a sense of scale, I thought it would be cool to see what the NEOM projects looked like if they were built in and around Seattle. The projects would cover the region, from Mount Baker to Mount Rainier, and from the Sound to Wenatchee.
A Seattle Line
The headline project in NEOM is The Line, a complete city packed in a 170-kilometer (106-mile) long superstructure. Renderings show a pair of planks heading into the distance; shiny on the edges and layered, hanging gardens between.
Laying the cornerstone of The Line at the Ferris Wheel on Pier 57 in Seattle, one quickly finds that Seattle is not 170 kilometers wide. So the Seattle Line would continue east across Lake Washington, through Issaquah, and into the mountains. It is a little unclear what the NEOM Line will be doing as it encounters topography, whether it will gently curve upwards or make a noted step. As it is, the length of the building must adjust some 7,000 feet (2,200 meters) to accommodate the curvature of the Earth.
But nothing in its path compares to the 3,000-foot elevation of Snoqualmie Pass. Really, the only comparable place to NEOM on the North American West Coast with a 170-kilometer flat run from the beach inland is the I-10 corridor through Los Angeles. The only others that come close would be some unique curving path through the Columbia River basin or the Golden Gate Bridge area of San Francisco Bay. But The Wiggle doesn’t sound as cool as The Line.
There’s a little discrepancy here, as the press articles for The Line talks about 170-kilometers of length, but the current satellite imagery is clocking in about 156-kilometers, which is the illustration we’re showing on maps in this article. From Seattle, going directly due east for 170 kilometers, the end of the building would be in Waterville, a town of 1,100 in Douglas County. Overlaying the current construction area in Saudi Arabia, the terminus would be Wenatchee. It would probably have a good view into the Gorge. If it were to follow the I-90 corridor, probably the advisable route through Snoqualmie Pass, the east end would be Ellensburg — a megaproject, indeed.
The length isn’t the only massive part of The Line. At 500-meters (1,640-feet) tall, The Line is planned to just about double the height of Seattle’s tallest building, Columbia Center. Currently, there are only 11 buildings in the world that are over 500 meters tall. Of those, the largest footprint belongs to the Makkah Clock Royal Tower in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Its base is some 1,300 feet (400 m) at its widest part, about 0.002% the length of The Line.
The Line’s base is proposed to be 200-meters (660-feet) across, or three average Seattle downtown blocks. If demolishing a straight path three blocks wide through the city sounds like a lot, it is. It would also be narrower than the footprint for I-5 in South Seattle, at SR 520, and through the U-District.
Now, for those playing along at home, a structure 170,000-meters long, 200-meters wide gives an estimate of 34 million square-meters, or a 34-square-kilometer footprint. Seattle is 217-square kilometers (83.9 square-miles). NEOM predicts it will have 9 million residents. Just the 4.5-kilometer portion of The Line that would run across Seattle could add 238,000 people to the city, pushing us over 1 million residents while using less than 2.5 acres. Seattle is not built out.
Just for further funsies, the world’s current 500-meter buildings run about 100 stories, giving an estimate of 3.4 billion m2 (36 billion square feet) of floorspace in The Line structures. The largest current building by area is the New Century Global Center in Chengdu, China, with 18.9 million square feet (1.7 million m2). The Line will have 2,000 times the built square footage. Amazon has about 13 million square feet (1.2 million m2) of space in Seattle. The Line would be 3,000 times that.
Washington actually has the world’s largest building by volume, Boeing’s assembly plant in Everett, where they built 747s. Its volume of 472 million enclosed cubic feet (13.3 million m3) would be replicated by The Line every football field and a half of its length, and then repeat that over a thousand times.
An Unexpected Ski Resort
Announced without as much worldwide press as The Line, the Saudis are proposing to build a ski resort as part of the NEOM project. Called Trojena, the proposed facility will be the country’s first outdoor ski resort. Much of the press does take pains to say, “Yes, it gets cold enough.” Actual precipitation is a different question, and most of the snow is expected to be manmade. That was enough to convince officials to name the site host of the 2029 Asian Winter Games before ground was broken.
The Trojena project will insert a resort among the otherwise undisturbed Sarawak Mountains, around the peak, Jabal al-Lawz. The mountain itself will be topped with a spire designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. The portal to the resort is referred to as The Vault, a semi-enclosed taco of glass, augmented reality, and hotel rooms as tall as the Space Needle and the width of Lake Union.
At the resort’s center is a mile-and-a-half long artificial body of water that can only be described as an Infinity Lake. It’s just like an infinity pool with a wet edge that melts into the sky, but with jeopardy to real boats.
The closest comparable full-service ski resort and alpine sports destination to Seattle would likely be Whistler, BC, having hosted the Winter Olympics. But Whistler also has tons of natural snow, three million visitors per year, and hundreds of trails. A single run at Whistler is about one-third the length of the total ski slopes planned for Trojena.
Trojena sits in relation to The Line approximately the same place that Mount Baker sits to Seattle. At 10,786 feet, Mount Baker is only 1,600 feet taller than Jamal al-Lawz. However, Baker has a much higher prominence, meaning its neighbors aren’t quite as close. The Mount Baker ski resort is 1000 acres, or 1/15th the size of Trojena.
More illustrative may be Washington’s beloved Bavarian town of Leavenworth. The Vault proposed for Trojena is the length of US 2 from Gustav’s to McDonald’s and though the decorated town center. It will be about half the height of the town’s ski hill and host most of the development’s 3,600 hotel rooms. Leavenworth has just over 1,200 rooms. The artificial lake would cover the distance from Leavenworth’s golf course to the fish hatchery. Sadly, there is no indication that the Kingdom will be waiving its strict alcohol policy to compete with Leavenworth’s liter beers, although wine and champagne may be coming to NEOM.
