Rise Tower

Rise Tower is a proposed two-kilometre-tall skyscraper in north Riyadh, designed by Foster + Partners for Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and set to stand roughly twice the height of the Burj Khalifa, the current world record holder at 828 metres. Planned at some 678 floors and carrying an estimated five-billion-dollar price tag, it is conceived as the centrepiece of the North Pole masterplan, a new district spanning roughly 306 square kilometres in the northern reaches of the capital. The tower is intended as a vertical destination rather than a single-use high-rise, stacking hospitality, workplace, observation and leisure levels through a structure that would push the engineering of tall buildings into genuinely untested territory, requiring new answers on lift strategy, wind behaviour and structural systems at a height no building has approached. PIF has opened bidding for the project-management role, the first formal procurement step on a scheme that would redraw the global skyline.