History is in the making as Saudi Arabia gears up to host the 10th Asian Winter Games in 2029 in Trojena, the Gulf Region’s first ever outdoor ski resort. Trojena is being built in the heart of NEOM, the kingdom’s most ambitious giga project. Scheduled for completion in 2026, the resort will include year-round skiing (3 months on snow and year-round synthetic “dry” skiing), retail stores, restaurants, luxury mansions, apartments and luxury hotels including serviced apartments operated by prestigious operators. By 2030, the tourist attraction is expected to host 700,000 annual visitors and be home to as many as 7,000 residents. The iconic development is designed by a consortium of architecture firms from all over the world with Aedas masterminding the design of the ski village. Responding to the client’s simple yet complex brief to ‘create something never seen before’, Aedas came up with a disruptive new paradigm for ski village typology. ‘For millennia, ski villages have had the same formula with multiple plots and buildings connected by roads. We challenged this convention by asking what if the village could be a building. This led us to dream up a superstructure that has the scale of a village but with all the connections and mobility happening vertically across several levels’, Aedas Global Design Principal Ignacio Gomez explains. The resort’s multi-level activation is a radical breakthrough in ski village design. At Trojena Ski Village, visitors will be able to smoothly transit between experiences through a range of vertical mobility devices, both passive and active. Using variety of mobility systems visitors will be able to move with ease to enjoy an active, outdoor lifestyle filled with moments of surprise and play. Trojena Ski Village is expected to be a year-round tourist destination. In addition to sporting events, the venue will host art, music and cultural festivals. While winter offers the chance to ski down Trojena’s snowy slopes, during the rest of the year, visitors will be able to ski on the synthetic surface slopes, engage in mountain biking, enjoy the zip line, Alpine coaster, and a variety of mountain sports in a one-of-a-kind place where technology meets nature.