This Giant Video Wall In Riyadh Subway Does Nothing More Than Guide Riders, And It’s Beautiful

December 23, 2025 by Dave Haynes

There was a good long time when me and probably most lifers on the technical and business sides of the digital signage and digital out of home sectors were thrilled to walk into a big commercial or public space and see a large video wall or cascading sequence of smaller screens.

End-users were actually deploying the stuff, and we were getting past the concept/nice-to-have stage. Real projects to reference, instead of just selling a dream.

Most of those early stage ones were either launched with advertising in mind, or evolved into that. But unless you have a direct stake in OoH media or the technology that drives it, I doubt you get the warm fuzzies walking into a big space and being visually clobbered by ads on video walls.

Which brings me to a newly launched project in Riyadh – at a subway station that is wildly different from the one that comes to mind when I think up contrasts in design and tone: Fulton Center in lower Manhattan.

Opened 12 years ago, that crazy-busy station is a hub for several lines and has an entry atrium lined by screens. There is a digital art program, but the screen network set up as big panels and ribbons exists for advertising.

The Qasr Al Hokm Metro Station in Riyadh, opened earlier this year, has one vast media wall, but it is there as part of the overall design. It doesn’t do anything more than act as a giant wayfinding visual that steers riders to the two lines that run through the station.

Motion visuals sweep between orange and blue (the color references for the two lines). It uses synchronized RGB light panels from an Austrian company, Zumtobel, and control software from the Spanish firm Poet. The building was designed by the Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta.

It’s simple and stunning – reminiscent of some early stabs at art-driven video walls using products like Christie’s original rear projection cube MicroTiles, going back 10-15 years.

This is in the capital of Saudi Arabia, so budgets are a wee bit different than those in most big cities. The default position in most cities large enough to need subways  would be to tender the visuals in the busiest passageways of new stations to media companies, who can bring revenue guarantees that offset operating costs. Some cities have even sold naming rights to corporations, kinda like what’s done with stadiums and arenas.

In deep-pocketed Riyadh, the local government had the luxury of thinking more about experience than operating budgets. The whole station is stunning, with a bowl-shaped polished stainless-steel canopy, public plaza and gardens.

The station is part of an overall $22B metro system that covers 110 miles and is automated.

While the Saudis may have the budgets to commission subway stations that look more like a museum or gallery, this video wall might not have been stupid-expensive. These are 100-plus low-rez RGB light panels in the wide mosaic, all set at a 45-degree angle to add to the visual interest.  I doubt those “pixel panels” are cheap, but probably less costly and complicated than more conventional LED cabinets and tiles.

I don’t think it’s realistic in most cities around the globe to assign giant budgets to public art and ambitious but very subtle wayfinding tools like this. In most cities, they just want services that come more often, are safe and have room to sit, on clean-ish seats you’re OK parking your butt on.

I’m also not sure I’d even call this install digital signage. It is much, much more about architectural lighting that drives experience. What it is, though, is a reminder that while it is possible and somewhat feasible as we head into 2026 to create huge video walls in spaces like this, it’s not necessarily the answer.

The Saudis, like their oil-rich neighbors, could have added a giant fine-pitch LED wall for a project like this and added a whole nuch of visual razzle-dazzle in a region that seems to love that stuff. Doing so would have been a rounding error in the overall budget. But they took their cue, instead, from the architect.

It’s gorgeous.

I need to get to Saudi and back to UAE. So much to see!