What Museums Can Learn
read the same in Bilbao as in Amsterdam. These buildings are efficient. They are legible. And they belong nowhere in particular— which means young people who grow up near them have no reason to feel they belong inside them.
Schiatarella, M. Somji
DAF proposes a different premise. Architecture that thinks with its site— its climate, its topography, its historical patterns of movement and settlement— produces spaces that carry memory in their walls, not as decoration but as structure. When a young person enters a building whose logic they can feel before they can articulate it, something different happens. Belonging is not explained. It is experienced.
What Museums Can Learn
Diriyah Art Futures is an educational institution, a laboratory, a residency, a production space for new media and digital art- is not a museum in the conventional sense. But the questions it raises are exactly those that Arab museums must now answer for themselves.
How do you design a space that is unmistakably of this region without becoming a monument to a static version of its past? How do you create an environment where young people— who navigate layered, mobile, digital identities— find something that feels genuinely theirs? How do you build for belonging rather than for prestige?
Schiattarella Associati’ s answer at DAF is architectural: start from the ground, read the landscape, translate tradition into principle rather than surface. The building does not tell young visitors who they are. It offers them a space in which to discover it— shaded, compressed, connected, and open, all at once.
Schiatarella, H. Alshatti
The education of a generation begins, in part, with the quality of the spaces they are given to inhabit. If those spaces feel borrowed from elsewhere, so will their relationship to the heritage those spaces are meant to carry. If those spaces feel grown from the place itself— from its soil, its light, its patterns of gathering and threshold— then belonging becomes not a program outcome but an architectural fact.
That is the ambition at Diriyah Art Futures. And it is the ambition every Arab cultural institution should bring to its next building.
Diriyah Art Futures, Diriyah( Riyadh), KSA. Completed 2024. 12,000 sqm. Design: Schiattarella Associati. Client: Diriyah Gate Development Authority. Educational Content: Le Fresnoy— National Studio of Contemporary Arts. www. schiattarella. com | daf. moc. gov. sa | dgda. gov. sa
Schiatarella, H. Alshatti
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