Case Study: Riyadh Municipality Headquarters

Architect: Faisal Al Fadl and Partners
Location: Riyadh

The project
This competition entry from Saudi architect Faisal Al Fadl was for a 50,000m² headquarters in the historic Deira district of Riyadh. The US$120 million development was designed by Al Fadl and a team of architects from the Middle East and Europe, including Italian architecture professor Francesco Moschini.

The scheme, which eventually lost out to an entry by Foster + Partners, was designed to help the municipality cope with Riyadh’s ever expanding population, as well as fuse traditional and modern Saudi Arabian design.

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The site
To the north the building faces Riyadh’s bustling King Fahd Road while to the east it opens up onto clusters of traditional Saudi dwellings. To the south of the building is the Al-Salam park.

The building supports an imaginary wadi, with a continuous line of vegetation consisting of scrubs, palms, dense bushes that begins from the cover of the car park, runs down the whole five-storeys of the building past the wide terraces, and down towards the courtyard.

The concept
The design has tried to fuse modernism and traditional Najd design, by situating a modern building in the heart of a historical district. Commenting on this, Professor Moschini said: “(The site) was based on economic as well as cultural reasons.

In past decades, the development of the city has been accompanied by extensive demolitions. These have greatly diminished the possibility of perceiving the capital of Riyadh as a historical landmark city.”

The Details
The shape of the building is based on simple geometry with natural alliance, with the elevations in a rectangle and a regular perpendicular building grid, evoking the traditional buildings of the Najd and based on the beauty and vigour of pure geometry.

The scheme draws inspiration from Riyadh’s historic Masmark Castle. A square courtyard features heavily in the design, with functional spaces set around and with clefts and hollows splitting the building in two, with a larger tower in the south and a smaller one in the north.

The cuts and hollows made to the base form ideally create a continuum from the streets and establish a visual relationship between the old building blocks and the new municipal complex. The various spaces include offices, exhibition spaces and a prayer room.

Because of the entirely glass façade the north wall will be orientated to minimize solar radiation protecting the exposed walls – east, south and west – to sun by means of an external screen that shades it from the sun but allows visual permeability.

The façade will be separated from the internal glass by a cavity wall, used for renewing the discharged air by directly removing the external thermal charge without affecting the internal areas occupied by residents and workers.