Shaded Pedestrian Walkway

A considerably large portion of tourism in Saudi Arabia is from religious pilgrims visiting holy sites. This constitutes the seconds largest income for the kingdom. The King of Saudi Arabia has commissioned the design of a shaded walkway of nearly 20 kilometres to protect the pilgrims from the heat. STUDIO IN-EX has been responsible for the architectural and structural engineering design of a 20 km long shaded pedestrian walkway that spans over 600,000 sqm of total area. Due to the length and curves of the path, standardising the tent units was not possible, so thousands of unique elements have been designed down to the smallest detail. Coordinating such vast amounts of geometry could not have been possible with traditional methods and has been much easier in a 3D BIM environment. The final design has been inserted into the Google Earth environment for an accurate Sun and Shadow Study.