Architecture is a profession that operates on commissions. The client provides the brief and the budget. The architect provides the vision and, implicitly, the legitimacy. A rendering by Zaha Hadid Architects transforms a construction project into a cultural event. A design by Bjarke Ingels Group transforms a developer’s ambition into a magazine cover. The exchange is understood: the architect provides aesthetic authority, and the client provides the cheque. The question of what happens beneath the rendering — who builds it, under what conditions, and at what human cost — is one that the profession has historically treated as outside its scope.
NEOM made that position untenable. Not because the human rights abuses were subtle or ambiguous, but because they were documented with a specificity that rendered ignorance impossible. By June 2024, when Dezeen identified 23 architecture studios working on NEOM and reached out to each for comment, the following facts were matters of public record: one man had been shot dead for refusing to leave his home; five men had been sentenced to death for social media posts; a 19-year-old had been sentenced to 20 years for mourning his uncle on Twitter; 21,000 workers had died across Vision 2030 projects; the kafala system trapped workers in conditions that the ILO was investigating as forced labour; and NEOM’s own CEO had been recorded saying he drove his workers “like a slave.”
Of the 23 studios contacted by Dezeen, none were willing to comment on the human rights concerns. The silence was comprehensive. It was also, in the architecture profession’s ethical framework, a position — one that equated design with neutrality and treated the conditions of construction as someone else’s problem.
Who Left
The departures form a timeline that tracks the escalation of documented abuses.
Norman Foster was the first and most prominent departure. Foster was a member of NEOM’s advisory board alongside other global figures including Carlo Ratti of MIT’s Senseable Cities Lab, Marc Reibert of Boston Dynamics, Tim Brown of IDEO, Dan Doctoroff of Sidewalk Labs, Travis Kalanick of Uber, and Jonathan Ive of Apple. In October 2018, days after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Foster’s spokesperson confirmed he wrote to the head of the advisory board suspending activities “whilst the situation remained unclear.” His withdrawal was swift and definitive. Apple subsequently claimed that Ive’s inclusion on the advisory board was “a mistake” — a characterisation that managed to simultaneously acknowledge the board’s toxicity and deny Apple’s awareness of it. Foster’s threshold for withdrawal was the murder of a journalist that dominated international headlines, not the eviction of a tribe or the conditions of construction workers. The distinction is significant: the threshold was a killing that the world noticed, not the structural violence that the world would take years to document.
Coop Himmelb(l)au, the Austrian firm founded by Wolf Prix, resigned from NEOM citing human rights concerns — one of the only firms to explicitly link its departure to the conditions documented at the project. The resignation was notable precisely because of its rarity. In a profession where departure is usually framed in neutral language — “the project’s scope changed,” “the timeline no longer aligned” — Coop Himmelb(l)au’s explicit citation of human rights marked an outlier position.
Morphosis, the Los Angeles firm founded by Pritzker Prize laureate Thom Mayne, led the design for The Line and its 2.4-kilometre first phase, known as the “Hidden Marina.” Morphosis departed the project in July 2024. No public statement was made regarding human rights. The departure was framed as a professional transition — the firm’s role in the design phase had concluded, and Delugan Meissl Associated Architects took over as lead designer. Whether the departure was voluntary, whether it was prompted by the escalating human rights documentation, and whether Morphosis considered the human cost of The Line before, during, or after its design work has not been addressed by the firm.
Mecanoo, the Dutch practice founded by Francine Houben, resigned from NEOM. The firm did not issue a detailed public statement explaining its reasons.
HOK, one of the world’s largest architecture firms, confirmed to the Architects’ Journal that it was “engaged in an early stage of design on The Line but is no longer participating in the project.” The statement acknowledged involvement and withdrawal without specifying the reason for either.
Adjaye Associates was dropped by NEOM in August 2024 — not for human rights reasons but following allegations of sexual misconduct against founder David Adjaye, published by the Financial Times. The departure was initiated by NEOM, not by the firm. It removed an architect from the project for personal conduct while the project’s own conduct toward workers remained unaddressed.
Who Stayed
The firms that remained on NEOM after June 2024 — after the death sentences, after the ITV documentary, after the HRW report, after the BWI forced labour complaint — present a consistent profile: internationally prestigious, financially dependent on large-scale commissions, and institutionally unwilling to subordinate commercial interests to ethical objections.
BIG — Bjarke Ingels Group, founded in Copenhagen — was announced as masterplanner for Oxagon at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023. BIG is one of the world’s most visible architecture firms. Its founder, Bjarke Ingels, has built a personal brand around the concept of “hedonistic sustainability” — the idea that architecture should be both environmentally responsible and joyful. In late 2025, BIG was informed that a “major” resort it was working on in Saudi Arabia had been cancelled — a decision that affected approximately half of BIG’s UK workforce and triggered mass redundancy plans, as reported by the Architects’ Journal. The firm’s continued involvement in NEOM after the documentation of forced labour conditions, death sentences, and systematic worker abuse represents an application of hedonistic sustainability that excludes the people who build the hedonistic buildings from the sustainability that the buildings are supposed to embody. The cancellation of its resort — the market’s verdict on the project’s viability — imposed a cost that the human rights documentation could not.
Zaha Hadid Architects continued work on a 330-metre crystalline skyscraper, the “Discovery Tower,” at Trojena — the NEOM mountain resort component whose contracts were subsequently cancelled in March 2026. ZHA’s position is complicated by the death of founder Zaha Hadid in 2016, which means the firm’s current leadership — director Patrik Schumacher — is making decisions about ethical engagement without the founder whose reputation underwrites the brand. Schumacher has been publicly criticised for positions on housing policy and social issues. He has not been publicly pressed on ZHA’s NEOM involvement.
OMA — the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, founded by Rem Koolhaas — designed resorts at the Gulf of Aqaba, including the Lejya hotel and the Zardun sanctuary resort, led by partner Chris van Duijn. OMA told Dezeen it was not working on The Line itself — a distinction that separates the firm from the most controversial component while keeping it within the NEOM zone. OMA’s intellectual reputation — Koolhaas has written extensively about the ethics of scale, spectacle, and the political dimensions of architecture — makes its continued involvement a particularly sharp instance of the gap between architectural theory and architectural practice.
Delugan Meissl Associated Architects, the Austrian firm, was named urban planner for Phase 1 of The Line on 11 November 2024 — one day before NEOM CEO Nadhmi al-Nasr’s departure was announced. DMAA was announced alongside Gensler, the world’s largest architecture firm by revenue, which was named city planning consultant for Phase 1, with its London office leading the work. Gensler was also appointed city asset design architect for critical infrastructure including transport hubs and public realm. Mott MacDonald, the UK engineering consultancy, was named city infrastructure engineer for Phase 1 on the same date.
The November 11 date is significant. It fell after the ITV “Kingdom Uncovered” documentary (27 October), after the HRW “Die First” report (4 December — published weeks later, but findings were shared with firms earlier), after the death sentences were upheld on appeal (January 2023), and after the BWI forced labour complaint was filed (June 2024). The three firms accepted commissions on NEOM’s most controversial component at a moment when the project’s human rights record was more comprehensively documented than at any previous point. The timing was not accidental. It was a commercial decision made with full informational availability.
UNStudio continued working on Trojena. Studio Fuksas maintained its involvement. Gensler, the world’s largest architecture firm by revenue, was identified as working on NEOM. Tom Wiscombe Architecture, Oyler Wu Collaborative, and Peter Cook’s Cook Haffner Architecture Platform were all named by Dezeen as NEOM participants.
In total, Dezeen identified 23 studios working on NEOM. Six departed or were removed. Seventeen remained. None of the remaining 17 commented publicly on the human rights concerns.
The Fee Question
Architecture firms do not typically disclose the fees they receive from individual commissions. NEOM’s architecture contracts are classified as confidential commercial agreements. The result is that the public debate about architectural complicity operates without the single most important datum: how much money the firms are receiving to stay.
What is known is that NEOM’s total spending exceeded $50 billion by early 2025. Architecture and design fees on major construction projects typically range from 5 to 15 per cent of construction value. Even at the lower end, the design fees on a $50 billion construction programme would exceed $2.5 billion. At the higher end — justified by the bespoke nature of NEOM’s designs, many of which required engineering solutions that had never been attempted — the fees could approach $7.5 billion.
Individual firm fees are not known. But the scale of the commissions — designing a 170-kilometre linear city, a mountain ski resort with artificial snow production, a floating industrial platform, a 330-metre crystalline tower — represents the kind of once-in-a-career work that architecture firms do not encounter in conventional commercial practice. The uniqueness of the commissions is part of the incentive structure: NEOM offered not just fees but the opportunity to design at a scale and ambition that no other client on earth could offer. The opportunity to design a linear city or a floating platform is professionally irresistible to firms that define themselves by the ambition of their work. The ethical cost is the price of that ambition.
The Ethics Debate
Dezeen posed the question directly in June 2024: “Is it time for architects to walk away from NEOM?” The question was addressed to the profession as a whole. The profession did not answer as a whole. Individual firms made individual decisions based on individual calculations that none were willing to explain publicly.
Lina al-Hathloul, head of monitoring and advocacy at ALQST, stated in an interview published by Dezeen on the same day: “NEOM is built on the blood of Saudis and migrant workers, for the benefit of western and international companies.” She called on architecture studios to either campaign for the release of imprisoned protesters or walk away. Neither option was taken by any firm that remained on the project.
The Nation published an article in December 2024 arguing that “everyone needs to disavow NEOM.” The article stated that firms still involved in Vision 2030 projects are “actively complicit in a scheme that has already resulted in mass death and displacement.” It added that their involvement “gives legitimacy to an illegitimate project” and that firms “are stained with the blood of some of the most vulnerable members of global society.” The language was sharp but its factual basis — the ITV documentary’s 21,000 deaths, the 20,000 indigenous people displaced — was not disputed by any of the firms named.
In August 2024, the incoming president of the Royal Institute of British Architects publicly defended work on NEOM — a position that placed the profession’s UK leadership in direct opposition to the human rights organisations documenting conditions on the ground. The defence was not accompanied by evidence that RIBA had conducted its own assessment of labour conditions at NEOM or that it had engaged with any of the documented findings.
Academic institutions proposed boycotts of firms involved in NEOM. Some architecture schools debated whether NEOM projects should be featured in design studios. The debate produced position papers and op-eds. It did not produce withdrawals.
The professional ethics codes that govern architecture in most jurisdictions do not explicitly require architects to assess the human rights conditions under which their designs are constructed. The American Institute of Architects’ Code of Ethics addresses obligations to clients, to the public, and to the profession. It does not address the labour conditions on construction sites in foreign jurisdictions. The Royal Institute of British Architects’ code is similarly silent on the question of whether an architect bears responsibility for the conditions experienced by the workers who realise their designs.
The gap in the professional codes is not an oversight. It reflects a deliberate scope limitation — one that separates the design from the construction, the drawing from the building, the architect from the builder. The limitation made sense in a world where architects designed buildings for clients in jurisdictions with functional labour law enforcement. It does not make sense in a world where architects design buildings for clients who sentence people to death for opposing the project and whose workforce operates under conditions that the ILO is investigating as forced labour.
The Precedent Question
The argument that architects should withdraw from NEOM is not without precedent, but the precedents are uncomfortable for a profession that prefers to frame its decisions in aesthetic rather than political terms.
During the apartheid era, some international firms withdrew from or refused commissions in South Africa. The withdrawals were not universal, and many firms continued to operate in the country throughout the sanctions period. But the principle that an architect could and should consider the political context of a commission was established — if not as a professional requirement, then as a moral possibility.
The Chinese construction of detention facilities in Xinjiang — for which Western engineering and construction firms provided materials and technology — produced a parallel debate in the early 2020s. Several firms severed ties with projects linked to the detention infrastructure. The principle extended beyond architecture to engineering, materials supply, and technology provision.
NEOM is different in scale but not in kind. The question is the same: does an architect bear responsibility for the conditions under which their design is constructed? If the answer is no — if architecture is purely a design service, morally neutral, applicable to any client under any conditions — then the firms that stayed on NEOM are professionally defensible and ethically irrelevant. If the answer is yes — if the design of a building implies some relationship to the conditions of its construction — then the firms that stayed on NEOM after the death sentences, after the 21,000 deaths, and after the forced labour complaint are implicated in a way that their fees document and their silence confirms.
The firms have chosen not to answer the question. Their continued presence on the project is itself an answer. And the buildings they are designing — the towers, the resorts, the marina, the industrial platform — will carry their names when they are completed, if they are completed. The names of the workers who built them will not appear anywhere.
The Architectural Press
The architectural media’s treatment of NEOM has evolved from uncritical celebration to qualified engagement, but the evolution has been slower than the evidence warranted.
In the early years of NEOM’s announcement, architectural publications — Dezeen, ArchDaily, the Architects’ Journal, Architectural Record, Domus — published NEOM’s renderings with the enthusiasm that the profession reserves for projects of unprecedented scale and ambition. The coverage treated NEOM as a design story. The renderings were analysed for formal qualities, material choices, and spatial innovation. The people who would live in the buildings, the people who would build them, and the people who had been displaced to clear the site were not part of the design story.
Dezeen’s June 2024 investigation marked a turning point. By identifying the firms, asking them for comment, and publishing the resulting silence alongside the documented abuses, Dezeen made the complicity visible. Subsequent coverage by the Architects’ Journal, the Architect’s Newspaper, and Architectural Review incorporated human rights reporting alongside design reporting, creating a more complete picture of what NEOM represented.
But the architectural press operates within the same economic constraints as the firms it covers. Architecture publications depend on advertising from architecture firms and construction companies. They depend on access to projects for photography and interviews. They depend on the profession’s goodwill for subscriptions and engagement. The publications that asked the hardest questions about NEOM are the publications that risk the most commercially.
The result is an architectural media that has documented the ethical questions more thoroughly than the profession has answered them — and that continues to publish NEOM renderings alongside NEOM investigations, creating a journalistic product that is simultaneously critical and complicit, that shows both the building and the blood, and that leaves the reader to determine which matters more.
The profession’s answer, measured by behaviour rather than statement, is clear. Seventeen of 23 firms remained. None commented. The buildings are still being designed. The workers are still in the camps. And the renderings — clean, luminous, unpopulated by labour — continue to circulate in a profession that has decided, through silence, that the design is its responsibility and the death toll is not.
This investigation draws on Dezeen’s June 2024 investigation into architecture firms working on NEOM; Dezeen’s interview with Lina al-Hathloul of ALQST; the Architects’ Journal (reporting on Morphosis departure, Adjaye removal, and Delugan Meissl appointment); World Architects; Artforum and Frieze (reporting on Norman Foster’s withdrawal); The Nation; the American Institute of Architects Code of Ethics; the Royal Institute of British Architects ethical code; Architectural Record; and the broader architectural press coverage of NEOM. Vision2030.AI is editorially independent and is not affiliated with NEOM, PIF, or any official Vision 2030 entity.