SOM Looks to the Mountains to Define a City That Doesn’t Exist Yet

A City Conjured From Steppe and Glass

Before Alatau existed, someone had to imagine its skyline. SOM got the call.

Kazakhstan is building a new city from scratch across 88,000 hectares outside Almaty, and at its center will stand two towers that haven’t been built yet for people who haven’t moved there yet, anchoring a district designed to become an international hub for a region most of the world couldn’t place on a map.

There’s something almost mythological about it.

The taller of the two reaches 272 meters, stepped and wedge-shaped, glazed and terraced at every level, with a central atrium that pulls daylight down into the building’s interior like a controlled wound in the facade.

Its form borrows from the Trans-Ili Alatau mountains nearby: stratified, ancient, indifferent to human scale. The 80-meter hotel beside it follows the same logic. Below both, a three-story podium fans out into retail, culture, and public life.

SOM describes translating “valleys, glaciers, and stratified terrain” into architecture. Which is another way of saying: the land told us what to build.

Once complete, the skyscraper will be the tallest structure in the region. For now it exists only in renders, hovering above empty steppe, waiting for a city to grow up around it.

Renders by SOM.