Arabia 2023

After checking in I walked over to the Kingdom Tower. It is an amazing building with the nice lights at night.
The shopping center was another one nobody really needs. All kind of international expensive brands, and no people.
I was hoping to get some nice food at the foodcourt. But they had basically all the big chains: McDonald’s, KFC, Subway … ended up with the Persian food and a nice coffee. Everything packed in tons of plastic, we are certainly not used to this anymore.
I tried the go up to the skywalk. The list was always out for a few minutes for maintenances, than the closed.

„Kingdom Centre (Arabic: مركز المملكة), formerly Kingdom Tower, is a 41-story, 302.3 m (992 ft) skyscraper in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. When completed in 2002, it overtook the 267-meter (876 ft) Faisaliyah Tower as the tallest tower in Saudi Arabia. It has since been surpassed and, as of 2021, is the fifth-tallest skyscraper in the country, whose tallest two buildings are the Abraj Al Bait Towers and the Capital Market Authority Tower. It is the world's third-tallest building with a hole after the Shanghai World Financial Center and the 85 Sky Tower in Taiwan.

The tower was developed by Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal and designed by the team of Ellerbe Becket and Omrania, who were selected through an international design competition. It is situated on a 100,000–square-metre site and houses the 57,000-square-meter Al-Mamlaka shopping mall, offices, the Four Seasons Hotel Riyadh, and luxury apartments. There is a 65m skybridge atop the skyscraper.

The upper third of the tower features an inverted parabolic arch topped by a public sky bridge. The sky bridge is a 300-ton steel structure, taking the form of an enclosed corridor with windows on both sides. After paying the admission fees, visitors take two elevators to reach that level.“Weiterlesen