Rise Tower, North Pole Project
Smart city systems architecture for the world's tallest building, a 2km, 678-floor vertical city in North Riyadh.
Smart city systems architecture for a 2km, 678-floor vertical city commissioned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. It is the centrepiece of the 306 km² North Pole Project near King Khalid International Airport. It is also a landmark in the Vision 2030 giga-project cluster, alongside NEOM and New Murabba. Six integrated building domains were designed from first principles during pre-construction planning. They are unified building management and AI-powered energy optimisation aiming for net-zero operations. They also include layered security and access control, predictive vertical mobility and digital tenant services. The sixth is a central real-time operations command centre. All six were specified as one coordinated package, so contractors bid on them together, not as six separate tenders.
Rise Tower posed a smart systems design problem with no direct precedent. Its 678 floors needed one building management architecture across HVAC, lighting, elevators, security and tenant services. All of it had to be specified before construction began, with no similar deployment to refer to. The design had to support a net-zero energy target and security for thousands of occupants. It also had to coordinate vertical mobility in under a second across the world's tallest structure.
Led smart city systems design across six integrated domains during pre-construction planning, engaged through Meinhardt Group. Wrote the IBMS specification for unified control of building services across all 678 floors. Specified the AI-powered energy management framework, aiming for net-zero operations. It draws on photovoltaics built into the facade and renewable power generated on the sky decks. Defined access control and emergency response for thousands of daily occupants. Designed predictive maintenance for the vertical mobility systems. Delivered the smart tenant services specification and the design of the central real-time operations command centre. Both were procurement-ready technical baselines.
Smart building systems architecture was delivered across all six domains during pre-construction. The integration architecture became the technical baseline for buying and specifying contractor work. It was the first building of this type to specify AI-driven energy optimisation across the full vertical stack, at a scale with no prior deployment to refer to.
- My role
- Led smart city systems design and wrote the IBMS specification, Meinhardt Group
Designing smart systems for 678 floors uses exactly the same integration logic as linking systems across five departments in one building. The design asks what each system needs to know in real time, what it decides on its own, and what goes to a human. Scale multiplies the data volume and the cost of failure. It does not change the design principles. Set the integration architecture first; the individual systems follow from it.
The same diagnostic logic from deployments like this one, applied to your business in half a day.
Book the WorkshopDiscuss a similar programme- Rise Tower: Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund giga-project; Foster + Partners design; 2km, 678 floors, centrepiece of the 306 km² North Pole Project, North Riyadh
- Bidding opens for Saudi Arabia's 2km-tall Rise Tower, Global Construction Review
- Employer testimonial letter from Meinhardt SUIT Pte Ltd (Managing Director, July 2025) naming this project available to procurement teams on request; not published online
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There's no manual for specifying smart systems across 678 floors of the world's tallest building. A good part of the pre-construction phase was admitting, out loud, that some of this had never been done before and had to be reasoned from scratch. The energy and vertical mobility teams argued for weeks over failure tolerances at that height. I'd rather have that argument on paper before the concrete pours than after. Getting all six domains bid as one coordinated package was the point.
