Building a new Riyadh

Contractors are currently doing basement work on stage one of the project.

“This city is very unique for Saudi Arabia,” he says.

“Currently there is nothing else that is this well thought-out, well-designed and built from scratch. We are trying to create the perfect environment for people to both work and enjoy.”

KAFD will also be up to standard with its environmental credentials. The entire site is expected to at least achieve the basic Leed environmental certification – which will be the first Leed accredited buildings in Riyadh.

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“We have a design guideline that states the energy saving we want the buildings to achieve, which basically comes down to how you deal with solar gain,” he says.

“One of the concepts is that the buildings are orientated in a certain way to be in shade most of the time. We’ll also have grey water treatment facility in each building.”

The architects from FX Fowle, who are designing Saudi Binladin’s parcels, say they are also using local materials and stone in the construction which will also help score Leed points.

The US-based FX-Fowle is one of several international architects working on KAFD. Upon its completion Alesia expects to be able to proudly point out various towers designed by a long list of well-known firms.

For now this vision is still a long way off. At the moment the contractors are only on the basement levels of the first ten parcels and furiously working 24 hours a day to stay on target.

Alesia says 2000m³ of concrete is being poured each day and 80,000m³ is in the ground so far. At the end of stage two, he says, a whopping 4 million t³ will have been poured.

But the big question remains, are they going to meet the mid-2012 deadline which the powers-at-be are expecting?

Alesia is confident. “I have no doubt. At the beginning we had a problem with procuring resources, but now it’s just dealing with the logistics and complexity of the site, it’s a real challenge but we’ll make it.”