For a king, an autocratic ruler, to draw a line in a desert or any town is an act of pure willfulness. Implementing what this line symbolizes is yet another thing. Circumstances of all sorts like people, customs, tradition, time, technical progress and prowess or financial and material limitations as well as their sheer availability, present challenges that simply cannot be neglected. The Arabian world has a fascinating mind-set and, particularly with regard to the western society, an equally rich cultural heritage. T.E. Lawrence, who supported the Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire as a British agent and became known under the nickname “Lawrence of Arabia”, tries in his autobiographical book “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” (1926) to bring the “peoples of the desert” that he admired so much closer to European readers: “The Semites”, Lawrence writes, using a term that actually comes from linguistics, „had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questionings. They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades.” T.E. Lawrence’s metaphysical musings – exactly one-hundred years ago – have taken on a new dimension in our present state of late-modernism. With global warming, the accelerated extinction of species or the boundless “blessings” of a globalized neoliberal economy the developed countries face an increasingly stringent critique. Being a powerful member of the G20 States Saudi Arabia is by no means exempt from it. With its Promethean politics and its continuous economy geared on dynamic stabilization it is set on a course of permanent acceleration. Seen from this perspective many of the giga-projects seem to be the pinnacle of the Anthropocene. One is tempted to view this kind of Arabian Futurism or indeed Accelerationism as an architectural interpretation of John Adams’ musical piece Short Ride in a Fast Machine. We know where it is coming from, but where exactly is it going to?