A New Urban Core – Giga-Portfolio

Project Overview

Over two years, TBH supported a Public Investment Company (PIF) in delivering a large, complex portfolio of works in Riyadh.

This development marks a pioneering urban landmark for the Kingdom — a next-generation city district designed to redefine modern living, commerce, and cultural engagement. It brings together innovative architecture, advanced sustainability systems, and human-centered planning to create a vibrant, walkable environment where people can live, work, explore, and thrive. It integrates residential, hospitality, retail, and community spaces with world-leading cultural, creative, and experiential offerings, forming a destination that seamlessly blends daily life with extraordinary moments. Designed around wellbeing and inspired by the Kingdom’s forward-looking vision, it combines cutting-edge infrastructure, smart-city technologies, and immersive public spaces to deliver an elevated urban lifestyle and a new global benchmark for iconic city-center development.

TBH’s Role

TBH was engaged, through the Lead Design Consultant (LDC), at the completion of the design competition and prior to the formal establishment of the development entity. TBH’s initial mandate was to test various development strategies to determine viability of the associated timeframes, and key risks and constraints to those delivery targets. TBH undertook significant constructability, programming, and risk analysis of the core assets through the critical concept design phase and supported the project across multiple key packages.

Understanding complex scope, constructability, and logistics is central to TBH’s value-add on large-scale development portfolios. Considerations for this portfolio included:

• Establishment of a range of development scenarios (including asset phasing and opening scenario analysis).
• Identification of the risks and opportunities, and constraints of the considered scenarios.
• Detailed constructability analysis of the core assets to determine available delivery methodologies and subsequent required timeframes for delivery.

TBH Difference

• Integrated Master Schedule provided senior management with an overarching delivery timeframe which could be used to test options, optimise and prioritise effort, and identify, quantify, and mitigate risk while maximise opportunities and ultimately provide confidence in decision making.
• Scenario Analysis was undertaken to determine a range of development strategies across different time horizons with their associated benefits and risk profiles. This supported the strategy team to prepare a Board of Directors recommendation for the time horizon of delivering the portfolio.
• Constructability Assessment – one of the great challenges of working across giga-portfolios in the Kingdom is the abundance of unique, ‘first of their kind’ assets. In this instance it could be said that the core asset, or assets, is one of the most complex and challenging structures in the world and required an extremely detailed constructability analysis (in collaboration with the specialist structural engineering consultant) to understand how it can be built and what that methodology then means in terms of delivery timeframe.