Crowned with cranes, the Jeddah Tower emerges in the distance as an under-construction 826-foot-tall spaceship presiding over Saudi Arabia’s second-largest city. Through the desert haze you can almost see the more than 3,000-foot height it was supposed to reach, the lively business district its innovative design was meant to inspire and the tens of thousands of people filling the palm-tree-lined boulevards at its feet.
Planners envisioned the tower as the piece de resistance of a full-on economic revitalization with the declared aim of nothing less than “changing the mind-set of Jeddah.”
Instead, six years after it was to open, it remains a construction site with no construction — at the moment, anyway — and looms like a question mark over Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s gamble to overhaul his country of 36 million people.
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — Crowned with cranes, the Jeddah Tower emerges in the distance as an under-construction 826-foot-tall spaceship presiding over Saudi Arabia’s second-largest city. Through the desert haze you can almost see the more than 3,000-foot height it was supposed to reach, the lively business district its innovative design was meant to inspire and the tens of thousands of people filling the palm-tree-lined boulevards at its feet.
Planners envisioned the tower as the piece de resistance of a full-on economic revitalization with the declared aim of nothing less than “changing the mind-set of Jeddah.”
Instead, six years after it was to open, it remains a construction site with no construction — at the moment, anyway — and looms like a question mark over Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s gamble to overhaul his country of 36 million people.
The unfinished Jeddah Tower skyscraper in the distance
The Jeddah Tower, the centerpiece of an ambitious development project in Saudi Arabia’s second-largest city, remains unfinished six years after it was to open. (Amr Nabil / Associated Press)
Enlisting some of the world’s star architects, Saudi Arabia is launching mammoth development projects by the dozen that it says will remake the country’s oil-based economy, cement its claim as the region’s commercial superpower and supercharge its cities’ ascent to global status.
With the powerful, $600-billion Saudi sovereign Public Investment Fund behind him, the crown prince is intent on eclipsing rivals in a region that is no stranger to Ozymandian-scale projects. In 2017, he announced his flagship Neom project, a Massachusetts-sized megacity being built in Saudi Arabia’s northwest. Then came the Line, a pair of “horizontal skyscrapers” stretching 105 miles — yes, miles, meaning that the two complexes would run an unbroken distance equal to that between downtown Los Angeles and Joshua Tree National Park.
There’s also Trojena, a ski resort that will host the 2029 Asian Winter Games; Oxagon, the world’s largest floating industrial complex; King Salman Airport, a so-called aerotropolis that is supposed to handle 120 million travelers by 2030; and Sindalah, an island project off Neom’s coast announced last month that bills itself as a 9-million-square-foot “playground for the world’s luxury travelers.”