Jeddah's Rising Son

Harasani: 'We're very short on architects and engineers in Saudi'.

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As Mohamed Harasani sits behind a desk in his hotel suite – overlooking the half finished sandy sites of Dubai Festival City – half of Jeddah is underwater.

His office has been on the phone, having lost power for a few days, and as he prepares to fly back to his home city, the rain continues to fall.

Jeddah has not fared well, and the situation has brought stern comments from Saudi King Abdullah as to how the city has once again failed to prepare for what is becoming an annual phenomena.

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“There is water running in the street like rivers,” Harasani says. “We never had such rainy season in Jeddah, and it wasn’t built to deal with it. It was never a problem so they didn’t take it very seriously. Now it is something that needs to be taken extremely seriously.”

Just as Jeddah needs to adjust to the changing climate, so Saudi too is going through a process of change. Over the past five years the market for major architecture firms like Harasani’s has ballooned.

He has gone from designing villas to designing high rise office blocks, this for a man who had to fight to get work at all when he first returned to the kingdom from architecture school in London and Liverpool.

At that time the bulk of lucrative government work was taken up by the same well established firms, while the private sector was seriously underdeveloped. For a young, recently graduated Saudi architect like Harasani, life was tough.

“In those days the main projects were the government initiated and were handled by many foreign international firms associated with a few Saudi architects in the kingdom,” he explains. “There was no way I could compete straight out of college with such firms or such projects, so I had to go into the private sector.”

That had its own challenges, Harasani says, because at the time private clients were not willing to invest in quality design. Architecture was not something that people believed you paid for.

“The private sector thought you were selling them paper, really, they were only willing to pay you what the paper cost. To them it was nothing, they didn’t really value the architect as an architect, and fees were low.

“In a way I am proud to say I really helped the profession in the kingdom, to be actually respected and to be in demand from the private sector.”