DIRIYAH ART FUTURES AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF BELONGING
The Ground as Architect
The Wall as Threshold
DIRIYAH ART FUTURES AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF BELONGING
By Matahef Magazine in collaboration with Schiattarella Associati
There is a question every architect faces when commissioned to design a cultural space in the Arab world: how do you build something new without erasing what was there before? How do you create a space where young people feel they belong— not as visitors to someone else’ s heritage, but as inhabitants of their own?
At Diriyah Art Futures( DAF), the Gulf’ s first contemporary hub dedicated to new media and digital art, the Roman firm Schiattarella Associati has proposed one answer. It is not the answer of imitation— decorative mashrabiyyas applied to a generic glass box. Nor is it the answer of erasure— a sleek international building that could be anywhere. It is something more difficult and more interesting: an architecture that thinks with the land it stands on.
The Ground as Architect
Situated along the Wadi Hanifa ridge north of Riyadh, near the UNESCO listed site of At-Turaif, DAF does not present itself as a single monumental building. Instead, it unfolds as a series of lean, distinct volumes extending horizontally across the landscape— following the logic of the wadi, the agricultural depression that has shaped settlement patterns in the Najd desert for centuries.
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We wanted the architecture to feel as though it emerged from the earth. This is our approach to design: harnessing natural values to create a contemporary language that resonates deeply with the location.
This is not merely poetic language. The building’ s passive design strategies are derived directly from desert tradition: narrow, deep passages between volumes create shaded corridors and channel wind from the wadi— the more humid zone— reducing temperature and protecting pedestrians from heat. The result is thermal logic embedded in spatial form, the way Najd architecture has always worked.
The architecture is waste-free— born, as is desert tradition, to answer as many needs as possible through form and spatial distribution, using site-specific conditions, materials, and knowledge. It is a contemporary project that meets the challenge of creating a new human dimension in a historically layered land, without importing a single solution from elsewhere.
The materials reinforce this continuity. Mud plaster and Riyadh stone— solidified sand that retains the resonance of the desert under sunlight— make the boundary between soil and structure intentionally ambiguous. The building does not sit on the land. It grows from it.
The Wall as Threshold
Perhaps the most conceptually precise move in DAF’ s design is its interpretation of the city wall— historically the boundary structure of Arab settlements, the line between the built city and the agricultural hinterland beyond.
This is the kind of historical thinking that produces genuinely new architecture. The wall is not quoted— there are no battlements, no crenellations, no pastiche. Instead, the principle of the wall is reinterpreted: a structure that connects what it separates, a threshold that gives meaning to both sides. The spaces between the building’ s volumes echo the narrow streets and small squares of ancient settlements— shaded, compressed, human-scaled— before opening into the larger program of studios, exhibition spaces, residences, labs, and auditorium that constitute DAF’ s 12,000 square metres.
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