Deja vu: construction of giant cube building starts in Saudi Arabia

We have written about giant cubes before. From the archives, a look at the Cubic City of 1929.

Bloomberg and Middle East Eye report that construction has begun on the Mukaab, a giant cube-shaped building 400 meters tall and wide.

According to Construction Briefing, “The cube will enclose a tower on top of a spiral base and a structure featuring 2 million sq m of floor space that will be a hospitality destination with retail, cultural and tourist attractions. It will also feature residential and hotel units, commercial spaces and recreational facilities.”

"It’s masquerading as a building today but it’s so much more," Michael Dyke, chief executive officer of New Murabba, told Bloomberg in a recent interview. When you’re inside you cannot see the dome,” Dyke said. “You could go to bed in the Serengeti and you can wake up in New York City. You can smell it, feel it and touch it.”

The thing is huge; phase one will have 8,000 units housing 35,000 people, and it will ultimately house 400,000 people. But that is not nearly as big as a cube building proposed for New York City in 1929. I wrote about it a few years ago and resurrected it after the late Charlie Munger proposed a giant cube student residence for 4500 students at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Much bigger than the Mukaab, it was two miles wide and high. From the archives:

The Cubic City

I have shown many visions for cities of the future, from King Gillette’s grand idea for Niagara Falls (which I still hope they will build) to Sky City in China. So when I saw the image of the Cubic City, shown above, I was intrigued. It was an idea put forward in 1929 by a Reverend Louis Tucker, in a science fiction story called “The Cubic City.”

It took a bit of digging to find the story behind the image that was evidently published in a 1929 issue of Science Wonder. According to Marten Kuilman of Quadralectic Architecture, the Reverend was “inspired by descriptions of the Bible (Revelation 4: 6-8) to create his utopian world.” 

This got me very excited; when I was in architecture school, I studied the Sharon Temple, north of Toronto, and learned these verses of Revelation because David Willson, the founder of the religious sect that built the temple, used the same passages as his blueprint. 

I started searching for the story, and the only place I could find it was in an anthology of old science fiction, which I was able to buy on Amazon for ten bucks (I love the Internet). The Cubic City is a terribly written story with a healthy dose of racism, sexism, and ableism thrown in. But there are some interesting ideas, including the concept of the crime of Inurbanity, of not being a good urban citizen:

It goes on to describe other crimes of Inurbanity, including being boorish or stupid, “people with complexes and phobias, “in short, who bother others too much and will not change, are classed as “Inurbane.” It then gets even more seriously politically incorrect. 

But there are also descriptions of the city, where Reverend Tucker shows how if you don’t need windows, you can pack people into a very efficient building. 

There are also vast sunbathing decks where people spend half an hour a day minimum in skimpy clothing to catch a few much-needed rays and let doctors check out their bodies. There is terrific internet service that gives you all the information and entertainment you could possibly use. 

In the end, There was not a lot to learn from the Reverend Louis Tucker about urban design that we did not know already: that going vertical is very efficient thanks to elevators and that you can pack a lot of people into a smaller amount of land, leaving the rest for parks and recreation and food. But I do like the idea of making Inurbanity a crime.