1 · POSITION
Ateliers Jean Nouvel designed Sharaan at AlUla — LHL-H-060Sharaan by Jean Nouvel — inside the Sharaan National Park, LHL-S-276 Sharaan National Park. Thirty-eight suites cut directly into the rock, with an International Summit Centre in an adjacent mountain and thirteen pavilions: fifty-three keys in all. The technique is taken from the Nabataeans who cut Hegra and Petra out of the same geology two thousand years ago, and the building is cooled and warmed by geological heat transfer.
2 · WHY HE IS IN THE LIBRARY
Because it inverts what a hotel building does. Every other house in Part IV stands on the land; this one is removed from it, and the architecture is the absence rather than the addition. Whether it succeeds is not yet knowable, which is itself the reason the entry is worth having.
3 · ⚑ WHAT IS NOT YET TRUE
Sharaan is not open. Rock excavation began on 25 March 2024; the opening has been given as 2023 and then 2026, and the key count reported as 38, 40 and 53 within two years. LHL-H-060 Sharaan by Jean Nouvel was admitted as pipeline before §22 was written and is kept under §6.1 — the only unopened house in the register, and its row says so. Nothing in this entry should be read as describing a building that exists.
4 · WHAT THIS MODEL DOES NOT SOLVE
A hotel cut into rock cannot be undone, and the Library has no way to assess the geological argument being made on its behalf. A building inside a protected reserve is also a test of the reserve’s own rules, which are audited by the IUCN Green List and were not written with a hotel in mind.