Below Ground, Into the Future
Against Standardization
DESIGNING MUSEUMS
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On one side lies the old historic center with its narrow streets and small buildings, and on the other the agricultural zone with gardens, fields, and wells. Between the two, city walls once served as both division and connection. Through these gates, water, crops, and building materials would enter the city. We’ ve recreated this passageway concept, where everything connects while clearly marking boundaries.
Below Ground, Into the Future
If the exterior of DAF is rooted in Najd heritage and desert logic, the interior moves confidently in the opposite direction— and the shift is deliberate.
The building’ s underground core, protected from sunlight and heat, houses the labs and studios for digital art. Here, the material palette changes: steel, glass, and cement are complemented by wood— a material rare in traditional Saudi interiors, signalling an intentional departure. At the centre of this underground space, a large open gathering area for artists receives natural light through a massive“ bell” that channels daylight deep into the earth.
This vertical journey— from the desert surface into the technological underground— is not simply a functional solution to climate. It is a spatial narrative: enter through the landscape, descend into the future. Heritage and innovation are not placed in opposition. They are organised as a sequence. The young person who moves through DAF experiences both— and understands, without being told, that one emerges from the other.
The café completes this layering with a contemporary mashrabiya— not a reproduction but a reinterpretation, reminiscent of stone walls sculpted by the wind: a second skin that lets in light, creating inner shadow play, allowing one to see without being seen. An ancient logic of privacy and threshold, applied to a twenty-first-century social space.
Against Standardization
DAF was conceived as Vision 2030’ s first public cultural project— a fact that might, in other hands, have produced something spectacular in scale and generic in character. Schiattarella Associati’ s explicit counterargument runs through the building’ s entire conception: that global internationalization has led to a flattening of cultural diversity, with progressive standardization of urban landscapes and a loss of architectural‘ biodiversity.’ The true challenge, in their view, is to start from the value of diversities— working on the distinctive characteristics and specific traits of each place.
This is the central design argument of DAF, and it is one that Arab museum professionals and cultural leaders should take seriously. The temptation, when building at scale and at speed, is to reach for the international template: the tested atrium, the familiar gallery sequence, the signifiers of cultural prestige that
DAF, Hassan Alshatti
92 MATAHEF ISSUE 03