The Arabia Felix that supplied the ancient world with frankincense, myrrh, and cinnamon – in present-day Yemen – has moved to the northeast of the peninsula, towards what in the greater part of history was simply Arabia Deserta. In the 1930s, under the sands of Ghawar in the Saudi kingdom, one of the largest oil fields on the globe was discovered, a find which catapulted the country onto the path to entering the list of leading economies by the end of the century.

This status has since been reinforced through huge image campaigns, especially necessary wherever an intransigent theocracy still reigns supreme. The importance of laundering publicity is well known to Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, who has made sure to introduce numerous reforms, timidly in matters of social rights but ambitiously in terms of soft power. With checkbook in hand he has managed, for example, to make Saudi Arabia host an Expo and a FIFA World Cup, attract scientists and elite sportsmen, and of course stuff the territory with macroprojects.

Not content with boasting the planet’s tallest building – the Mecca Clock Royal Tower, zero in taste – the nation’s de facto ruler now wants to double the record of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa with a two-kilometer skyscraper commissioned to Foster+Partners. After the fiasco of another megalomaniac undertaking (The Line, to be reduced for cost reasons), it remains to be seen how the new challenge, about which little is known, will be met, and if it will stand out for being more than a height made possible by black gold. As Liz Taylor tells a new-rich James Dean in Giant, “Money isn’t everything, Jett.”[+]