The glass giant

The Kingdom Centre in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's fifth tallest skyscraper, is a structure deeply linked to Islamic tradition: a 1,220,000-m³, 300-metre-high glass monolith, set in the red-hot desert sand, with a parabolic opening on the 120-metre high steel top, a gigantic crescent that makes it the third tallest skyscraper with a hole in the world, and the first in Europe and the Middle East.

Prince Al-Waleed commissioned the Kingdom Centre Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, in the heart of the lively Al-Olaya commercial as a symbol of the city, making it the Eiffel Tower of Riyadh.

A multifunctional building built from 1998 to 2002, it has 99 floors (two underground, with technical rooms), distributed between a very airy 25-metre high entrance hall, offices, residential apartments, the luxurious Four Seasons Hotel, the headquarters of Kingdom Holding, a shopping centre with various restaurants (with a floor for women to shop without headscarves), a conference centre, a sports centre with a swimming pool and tennis courts, outdoor and underground parking (with a capacity of 3,000 vehicles) and even a mosque (on the 77th floor), the tallest in the world.

Of course, there is also the panoramic lift, and there is even a pod for cleaning the facade, which adds up to a working surface area of 115,288 square metres; in short, there is a lot to clean.

The facade is entirely covered with a glass surface resistant to this region's heat and strong sunlight (whose maximum temperature in the hottest months averages around 40°).