AtkinsRealis Masterplan Design

AtkinsRealis Masterplan Design

AtkinsRealis, the Montreal-headquartered global professional services and project management company, holds the masterplan design commission for both The Mukaab and the broader New Murabba development. This appointment positions AtkinsRealis at the center of what may be the most ambitious architectural and urban planning undertaking in history — designing a 19-square-kilometer downtown centered on the world’s largest building by volume.

The Appointment

The New Murabba Development Company (NMDC), a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Public Investment Fund, appointed AtkinsRealis to provide advisory, architecture, masterplanning, and engineering services for the New Murabba development. AtkinsRealis’s winning scheme was described as being influenced by Najdi architecture, blending Riyadh’s cultural heritage with future aspirations.

The scope of the appointment encompasses both the masterplan for the 19-square-kilometer development — including 18 neighborhoods, transportation infrastructure, public spaces, and community facilities — and the architectural design of The Mukaab itself. This dual scope requires coordination across scales ranging from urban planning to building detail design, a range that few architectural practices are equipped to manage.

AtkinsRealis Profile

AtkinsRealis, formerly known as SNC-Lavalin, is one of the world’s largest engineering and professional services firms. The company’s architecture and design division brings experience from major projects across the Middle East, including significant work in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The firm’s engineering capabilities across structural, mechanical, electrical, and civil disciplines provide integrated design capacity that a pure architecture practice could not offer for a project of this complexity.

The company’s dual expertise in architecture and engineering is particularly relevant for the Mukaab, where the structural design and facade engineering are inseparable from the architectural concept. The mega-frame that supports the cube, the parametric triangular cladding that defines its appearance, and the internal spiral tower that creates its experiential core are simultaneously architectural and engineering challenges that benefit from integrated design thinking.

Design Philosophy

AtkinsRealis’s design for the Mukaab and New Murabba rests on several key principles. Cultural rootedness grounds the design in the Najdi architectural tradition, avoiding the generic international style that characterizes many Gulf mega-developments. Technological ambition drives the integration of immersive digital technology with physical architecture. Walkable urbanism shapes the 15-minute city concept underlying the masterplan, where residents can access most daily needs within walking distance. Sustainability targets include net-zero energy goals and 25 percent green space allocation.

The masterplan organizes the 19-square-kilometer site around the Mukaab as its iconic center, with residential neighborhoods, commercial districts, and cultural institutions radiating outward. The New Murabba Stadium, designed separately by Arup, sits within the masterplan as a key public venue for the FIFA 2034 World Cup and subsequent community use.

Coordination with Other Consultants

AtkinsRealis works within a broader consultant ecosystem. Bechtel provides project management services for the masterplan and site-wide infrastructure. Aecom manages project delivery for all buildings within the development except the Mukaab. Parsons Corporation serves as Infrastructure Lead Design Consultant. HSSG Foundation Contracting executes the piling works. This multi-firm structure requires AtkinsRealis to coordinate its design vision across multiple delivery teams — a management challenge compounded by the project’s unprecedented scale.

The coordination challenge is particularly acute for the Mukaab itself, where the structural engineering, HVAC design, vertical transportation, and holographic technology must all integrate within AtkinsRealis’s architectural concept. Any modification to one system creates ripple effects across the others, requiring a design management process that can handle thousands of interdependencies at once.

Impact of the 2026 Suspension

The January 2026 construction suspension creates uncertainty for AtkinsRealis’s design work. While infrastructure design continues — Parsons Corporation was awarded a 60-month contract in January 2026 for infrastructure design — the scope and timeline for the Mukaab building itself is under review. AtkinsRealis’s design team may need to adapt its plans to reflect revised timelines, potentially modified building programs, and the phased delivery approach now being adopted.

Urban Design Principles

The AtkinsRealis masterplan for New Murabba applies contemporary urban design thinking at a scale rarely attempted. The 15-minute walkable downtown concept structures the 19-square-kilometer site so that residents and visitors can access daily necessities — retail, dining, healthcare, education, and recreation — within a 15-minute walk from any point in the development. This pedestrian-first approach contrasts sharply with Riyadh’s existing car-dependent urban form and represents a deliberate shift toward the compact, mixed-use urbanism promoted by Vision 2030’s urban development goals.

Green space allocation of 25 percent across the development integrates walking paths, cycling infrastructure, and biodiversity corridors with the local ecosystem including wadis — the seasonal watercourses characteristic of the Arabian landscape. These green corridors serve multiple functions: recreational amenity, microclimate cooling through evapotranspiration and shade, stormwater management, and ecological connectivity. The integration of green infrastructure with the development’s sustainability targets including net-zero energy goals demonstrates a holistic approach to environmental design.

The masterplan also addresses the challenge of creating a functional urban district around an architectural centerpiece of unprecedented scale. The Mukaab’s 400-meter height and 400-meter width create shadow patterns, wind effects, and visual impacts on surrounding neighborhoods that required careful computational analysis during the design phase. AtkinsRealis used parametric modeling to optimize the placement, height, and orientation of buildings in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding the cube, ensuring adequate daylight, manageable wind conditions at street level, and sightlines that maximize the Mukaab’s iconic visibility from key approach routes.

Technical Capabilities and Middle East Experience

AtkinsRealis brings substantial Middle East experience to the Mukaab commission. The company’s regional portfolio includes major infrastructure, transportation, and building projects across Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and other Gulf states. This regional experience provides familiarity with the specific challenges of desert construction — extreme heat, sand exposure, logistical constraints, and the regulatory frameworks governing construction in the Gulf Cooperation Council states.

The firm’s engineering capabilities span structural analysis using advanced finite element methods, computational fluid dynamics for wind load assessment, thermal modeling for climate control optimization, and building information modeling (BIM) for coordination across the many disciplines involved in the Mukaab’s design. The integration of these capabilities within a single firm reduces the coordination overhead that would arise if architecture, structural engineering, and MEP engineering were distributed across separate practices.

AtkinsRealis’s rebranding from SNC-Lavalin in 2023 coincided with its appointment to the New Murabba project, positioning the Mukaab commission as a flagship project for the company’s renewed identity. The firm’s global workforce of over 36,000 employees provides the resource depth needed to sustain a multi-year, multi-disciplinary design effort of this magnitude while continuing to serve other clients worldwide.

BIM and Digital Design Infrastructure

The design coordination for a project of the Mukaab’s complexity demands building information modeling (BIM) infrastructure at a scale that pushes the limits of current software platforms. AtkinsRealis maintains a federated BIM model that integrates architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing disciplines into a single coordinated digital twin. This model — containing millions of individual elements across 2 million square meters of floor area — requires dedicated computing infrastructure and specialized model management protocols to remain navigable and responsive.

The BIM model serves not only as a design coordination tool but as the basis for construction documentation, quantity surveying, fabrication data extraction, and eventually facilities management during the building’s operational life. The transition from design BIM to construction BIM to operations BIM represents a lifecycle data management challenge that AtkinsRealis must plan for from the earliest design stages, embedding data structures and naming conventions that will remain useful decades after the current design team has moved on.

Design Challenges and Innovations

The Mukaab presents AtkinsRealis with design challenges that exceed any previous commission in scale and complexity. The cube geometry requires structural solutions that cannot be derived from existing supertall building precedents. The holographic dome introduces entertainment and immersive technology requirements that overlap with theme park design, digital art installation, and virtual reality engineering — disciplines outside conventional architectural practice. The autonomous transportation network within the structure requires coordination with vehicle technology companies and transit planning specialists.

AtkinsRealis’s response to these challenges involves assembling specialist teams from across the company’s global offices and, where necessary, engaging external consultants with expertise in areas like holographic projection technology, acoustic engineering for the building’s entertainment systems, and IoT sensor integration for the smart building platforms. This collaborative model extends AtkinsRealis’s in-house capabilities while maintaining the firm’s overall design leadership.

The firm must also design for constructability — ensuring that the architectural vision can be physically built with available construction methods, materials supply chains, and the workforce skills accessible in Saudi Arabia. The contractor ecosystem involves multiple firms including Bechtel, Aecom, Parsons, and HSSG, each requiring design documentation that meets their specific construction methodologies and quality systems. AtkinsRealis’s design output must therefore serve as a practical construction manual as well as an architectural statement, a dual requirement that adds complexity to every design decision.

Vision 2030 Alignment and Strategic Role

AtkinsRealis’s commission for the Mukaab and New Murabba sits squarely within the strategic framework of Saudi Vision 2030, the Kingdom’s economic diversification program launched in 2016 under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Vision 2030 identifies tourism, entertainment, and culture as priority sectors for development, and the Mukaab is positioned as the architectural centerpiece of this transformation — a singular destination designed to attract international visitors and establish Riyadh as a global cultural capital alongside Dubai, Singapore, and London.

The masterplan’s alignment with Vision 2030 extends beyond tourism to urban development policy. The Kingdom’s National Spatial Strategy calls for Riyadh to grow from approximately 7.5 million residents to 15 million by 2030, requiring massive investment in housing, infrastructure, and community facilities. The New Murabba masterplan’s 104,000 residential units, integrated transportation networks, and 15-minute city design principles directly serve this population growth target while demonstrating a model of urban development that other Saudi cities could replicate.

AtkinsRealis’s design must therefore satisfy not only architectural and engineering requirements but also national policy objectives spanning economic diversification, tourism development, cultural preservation, housing delivery, and environmental sustainability. The firm’s ability to integrate these policy dimensions into a coherent physical design distinguishes the Mukaab commission from conventional architectural practice, where the brief typically addresses building performance rather than national strategy.

Global Comparisons and Industry Context

The scale of AtkinsRealis’s commission for New Murabba has few parallels in architectural history. The most comparable appointments include the masterplanning of Songdo International Business District in South Korea (607 hectares), Masdar City in Abu Dhabi (600 hectares), and King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia (173 square kilometers). Each of these involved masterplanning a new urban district from greenfield conditions, but none included a single building approaching the Mukaab’s scale within the masterplan.

The firm’s competitors for the commission reportedly included several of the world’s leading architecture and engineering practices with established Middle East portfolios. AtkinsRealis’s selection reflected not only its design vision but its engineering depth — the ability to resolve the structural, mechanical, and environmental challenges of a 400-meter cube within the same organization that conceived the architectural concept. This integrated capability, inherited from the firm’s engineering heritage as SNC-Lavalin, proved decisive in a competition where the building’s feasibility was as important as its aesthetic ambition.

The appointment also reflects a broader trend in Gulf mega-project procurement, where clients increasingly favor integrated firms capable of managing the full design lifecycle rather than assembling loose consortiums of specialist consultants. The Mukaab’s complexity — spanning structural engineering, facade technology, holographic systems, autonomous transportation, and urban planning — demands a level of coordination that fragmented consultant teams struggle to achieve. AtkinsRealis’s ability to provide this coordination under a single design leadership structure reduces interface risk and accelerates decision-making across the project’s many interdependent systems.

Legacy and Significance

If completed as designed, the Mukaab will represent the most significant commission in AtkinsRealis’s history and one of the most consequential architectural projects of the 21st century. The building will establish precedents for cube-form mega-structures, immersive architecture integrating digital technology with physical space, and culturally rooted contemporary design at scales previously reserved for generic international modernism.

The project also demonstrates the continued relevance of large, integrated engineering and architecture firms in delivering projects that exceed the capacity of specialist boutique practices. While many of the world’s most celebrated recent buildings have been designed by small studios, the Mukaab’s combination of unprecedented structural requirements, massive MEP systems, fire safety challenges, and urban planning complexity demands the resource depth and multidisciplinary integration that only firms of AtkinsRealis’s scale can provide.

For related coverage, see our analysis of structural design, construction timeline, Najdi architectural heritage, and PIF investment strategy.