The Line is a 170km long urban development in Northwestern Saudi Arabia that seeks to redefine paradigms of urban living for a net-zero future. This work represents a set of modules in the mega-project city that would house 80,000 people and all of the infrastructures of life that support them. The parameters were to work within the radical urban canyon form to bring together the best of what humanity has learned about living with density.
Hyper-density radically reduces the city's impact on the natural landscape and allows for net-zero infrastructural development, but it poses a fundamental design problem: how do we maintain the fundamental phenomenological human connection to nature, space, and place in an engineered world? Our approach in Module 42 was to turn the tapestry of urban fabric - streetscapes, plazas, alleys, and avenues - on its side, forming two program-rich blades that frame the vast space of the urban canyon. Floating at various levels within this space are massive civic parks. Here, the immensity of space and identity of the city can be experienced from the landscapes of Saudi Arabia, which have been reconstructed 300 meters in the sky.
At a distance, the walls of the canyon that house the bulk of the city's activity create a singular, clean urban form. Experientially, however, these walls are rich, porous networks unto themselves. Pocket parks and apertures open to internal atriums and mobility systems. Schools, museums, and religious buildings occupy idiosyncrasies in the vertical urban grid, and in doing so create reimagined, 3 dimensional plazas. Urban farming is integrated throughout the city in various forms that anticipate the use of new drone technologies to maximize the use of all
Landscape Design Ken Smith Workshop
Mobility and Transportation Buro Happold
Structural Engineering LERA
Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing Jaros Baum & Bolles
Sustainability Atelier Ten
Waste Management LDK Consultants
Programming VK:u urban
Constructability KPM Engineering
Cost Consulting Gleeds
Life Safety CCI
Civil Engineering Langan
Exhibition Model Immensa Labs
Visualization UVIZ
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