I lived in Riyadh for 13 months between 2010 and 2011, during that time I was watching, and now continue to follow the gradual transformation of 160 hectares, one square mile in old money, of desert into a compact city centre with some pretty bold aims in terms of achieving a ‘green’ development in the hottest capital on earth.
A bit about Riyadh, it is a city that is constantly growing but is approximately 1500 square kilometres situated on a plateau some 200m above sea level, the city was founded at Ad Diriyah which is the ruin of a traditional Arabian walled city built on an oasis. From the Riyadh plateau it is unbroken desert in any direction, leading to the Persian Gulf in the East and the Hijaz Sarawat mountains on the Red Sea Coast in the West.
The natural green areas of Riyadh have been inundated by the relentless grid over that past three decades, and very little trace remains. A long term project, the restoration of the Wadi Hanifah, has been gradually returning green areas to the city, but the King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) is by far the most significant in changing attitudes towards sustainability in Riyadh.
The prevalent attitude driving development has been that it is not possible to build in a sustainable way in the Middle East and the only option is more sprawl and more energy consumption. Here a reversal of that strategy is unfolding, an integrated mixed use development comprising 70 blocks, 34 of which are towers within the 1.6 square kilometres, with the tallest at 80 storeys. It will be theoretically possible to live and work in the same place, and even walk to work with the aid of air conditioned bridges between blocks. A monorail, part of the soon to be commenced Riyadh Metro, will circle the development eliminating the need for short car journeys, for Ex pats at least. The project will provide 300 hectares of office floor space and will accommodate 12,000 residents. It is the largest LEED project in the world. The master plan was developed by Shankland Cox in 2006/2007, and the members of the architectural elite of the world are involved in the design of the towers. Each one designed to minimise heat gains to reduce the demand for energy usage through the district cooling. The target is to reduce water consumption by 50% and maximise the reuse of waste water for irrigation.
Having driven past the project on a number of occasions, it is clear that there is a very concerted effort to create a ‘green’ environment, from the dense planting on the highway intersection the feeling is not one of a depressing desolate environment, but one of possibilities in managing the environment. My former office DAR were handling the construction supervision of a number of parcels on the site so it was not difficult to set up a site visit and witness the ‘greening’ process in action.
Arrival at the site is via a one number of identical security gates that all seem to be numbered the same so finding the right gate to report to turned out to be quite a challenge, once through the correct gate, came the next challenge of finding the right site office in a city of Portakabins, all identical, completely obscured by allocated but seemingly random car parking zones where all the dust covered cars are parked so close together that it seems impossible to get out, the tight driveway between the cars, scarcely sufficient to manoeuvre. The volume of people working here is astonishing! GMC yellow School buses, like the one seen in Dirty Harry are parked up in rank.
Once into the artificial cool of the cluster of site cabins, it is time for an introduction to the project and a safety briefing from an Indian site agent which goes along the lines of ‘we have health and safety’. So armed with the knowledge that we have heath and safety, and kitted out with high visibility jackets, hard hats and site boots, note the lack of safety glasses and gloves compared to visiting UK sites, it is an en-masse guided tour of the parts of the project being supervised by DAR.
Everywhere there are armies of workers, with at least 3 assigned to every task, narrowly avoiding being squashed by the constant movement of site vehicles. The skyline from this level is filled with tower cranes, tower cranes and more tower cranes. I don’t think I have seen so many in one place, and beneath them concrete structures twist out of the ground in an array of different combinations that will result in each tower having its unique identity. On the podium that will become the new network of streets and spaces, a sea of steel reinforcing bars so tight that it seems that there is no space to pour the concrete, and sure enough a concrete pump sending a very liquid concrete in between them as if to prove a point. A walk down a ramp into one of the many sub basements provides a welcome break from the heat, and five stories down in the zone that will become the water tanks for the tower above, it is notably cooler than the crazy heat on the surface.
Climbing up one of the staircases to the podium workers are scabbling back stair nosings and further up are recasting them, a labour intensive process, I guess quality control systems are not so strict here. On the surface a two storey deep trench cut from the sandstone will become the service corridor accommodating the district cooling that will make this project work. A wait in what will become an impressive lobby, gangs of workers emerge from the lift, before it is our turn to ascend in the slow moving steel cage to the 15th floor. Not the highest vantage point on the project but high enough feel a temperature drop from the 50+ degrees on the ground, and to give a good impression of the vast array of work being undertaken simultaneously, a state of chaos where everybody seems to know what they are doing.
An army of diggers working in a line scoop out the soft sandstone that was the sea bed 80 million years ago, to form more basements, to what will become museums and community facilities. Alongside, the service corridor trench is being hollowed out to feed more areas of the development.
The panorama reveals numerous blocks tightly packed between the tower cranes, each one will accommodate offices, apartments, hotel rooms where the blocks themselves will cast shadows on the ground and provide natural cooling to its neighbour. Looking beyond the activity to the south, Riyadh with Kingdom and Faisaliah shimmering in the heat haze, with more towers emerging along the King Fahd Road, to the North Tamkeen tower, Al Yasmine one of the site that I was once involved in, that on the map seems remote from the city is steadily being caught up by the constant march of development that is the ongoing Riyadh sprawl.
The green highway intersection that I have driven on so many times appears as a park from here, and the vision of the project becomes so clear, this is not Le Corbusier’s Towers in the park, this is a far more dense version, probably more akin to wall street, except the dark spaces between buildings are a welcome refuge from the heat, where the heat island effect, where hard surfaces reflect heat back into the atmosphere, is eliminated. Creating an urban environment where for some of the year at least it will be possible to walk outside and enjoy the outdoor experience that is so lacking elsewhere in the city.
A bit about Riyadh, it is a city that is constantly growing but is approximately 1500 square kilometres situated on a plateau some 200m above sea level, the city was founded at Ad Diriyah which is the ruin of a traditional Arabian walled city built on an oasis. From the Riyadh plateau it is unbroken desert in any direction, leading to the Persian Gulf in the East and the Hijaz Sarawat mountains on the Red Sea Coast in the West.
The natural green areas of Riyadh have been inundated by the relentless grid over that past three decades, and very little trace remains. A long term project, the restoration of the Wadi Hanifah, has been gradually returning green areas to the city, but the King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) is by far the most significant in changing attitudes towards sustainability in Riyadh.
The prevalent attitude driving development has been that it is not possible to build in a sustainable way in the Middle East and the only option is more sprawl and more energy consumption. Here a reversal of that strategy is unfolding, an integrated mixed use development comprising 70 blocks, 34 of which are towers within the 1.6 square kilometres, with the tallest at 80 storeys. It will be theoretically possible to live and work in the same place, and even walk to work with the aid of air conditioned bridges between blocks. A monorail, part of the soon to be commenced Riyadh Metro, will circle the development eliminating the need for short car journeys, for Ex pats at least. The project will provide 300 hectares of office floor space and will accommodate 12,000 residents. It is the largest LEED project in the world. The master plan was developed by Shankland Cox in 2006/2007, and the members of the architectural elite of the world are involved in the design of the towers. Each one designed to minimise heat gains to reduce the demand for energy usage through the district cooling. The target is to reduce water consumption by 50% and maximise the reuse of waste water for irrigation.
Having driven past the project on a number of occasions, it is clear that there is a very concerted effort to create a ‘green’ environment, from the dense planting on the highway intersection the feeling is not one of a depressing desolate environment, but one of possibilities in managing the environment. My former office DAR were handling the construction supervision of a number of parcels on the site so it was not difficult to set up a site visit and witness the ‘greening’ process in action.
Arrival at the site is via a one number of identical security gates that all seem to be numbered the same so finding the right gate to report to turned out to be quite a challenge, once through the correct gate, came the next challenge of finding the right site office in a city of Portakabins, all identical, completely obscured by allocated but seemingly random car parking zones where all the dust covered cars are parked so close together that it seems impossible to get out, the tight driveway between the cars, scarcely sufficient to manoeuvre. The volume of people working here is astonishing! GMC yellow School buses, like the one seen in Dirty Harry are parked up in rank.
Once into the artificial cool of the cluster of site cabins, it is time for an introduction to the project and a safety briefing from an Indian site agent which goes along the lines of ‘we have health and safety’. So armed with the knowledge that we have heath and safety, and kitted out with high visibility jackets, hard hats and site boots, note the lack of safety glasses and gloves compared to visiting UK sites, it is an en-masse guided tour of the parts of the project being supervised by DAR.
Everywhere there are armies of workers, with at least 3 assigned to every task, narrowly avoiding being squashed by the constant movement of site vehicles. The skyline from this level is filled with tower cranes, tower cranes and more tower cranes. I don’t think I have seen so many in one place, and beneath them concrete structures twist out of the ground in an array of different combinations that will result in each tower having its unique identity. On the podium that will become the new network of streets and spaces, a sea of steel reinforcing bars so tight that it seems that there is no space to pour the concrete, and sure enough a concrete pump sending a very liquid concrete in between them as if to prove a point. A walk down a ramp into one of the many sub basements provides a welcome break from the heat, and five stories down in the zone that will become the water tanks for the tower above, it is notably cooler than the crazy heat on the surface.
Climbing up one of the staircases to the podium workers are scabbling back stair nosings and further up are recasting them, a labour intensive process, I guess quality control systems are not so strict here. On the surface a two storey deep trench cut from the sandstone will become the service corridor accommodating the district cooling that will make this project work. A wait in what will become an impressive lobby, gangs of workers emerge from the lift, before it is our turn to ascend in the slow moving steel cage to the 15th floor. Not the highest vantage point on the project but high enough feel a temperature drop from the 50+ degrees on the ground, and to give a good impression of the vast array of work being undertaken simultaneously, a state of chaos where everybody seems to know what they are doing.
An army of diggers working in a line scoop out the soft sandstone that was the sea bed 80 million years ago, to form more basements, to what will become museums and community facilities. Alongside, the service corridor trench is being hollowed out to feed more areas of the development.
The panorama reveals numerous blocks tightly packed between the tower cranes, each one will accommodate offices, apartments, hotel rooms where the blocks themselves will cast shadows on the ground and provide natural cooling to its neighbour. Looking beyond the activity to the south, Riyadh with Kingdom and Faisaliah shimmering in the heat haze, with more towers emerging along the King Fahd Road, to the North Tamkeen tower, Al Yasmine one of the site that I was once involved in, that on the map seems remote from the city is steadily being caught up by the constant march of development that is the ongoing Riyadh sprawl.
The green highway intersection that I have driven on so many times appears as a park from here, and the vision of the project becomes so clear, this is not Le Corbusier’s Towers in the park, this is a far more dense version, probably more akin to wall street, except the dark spaces between buildings are a welcome refuge from the heat, where the heat island effect, where hard surfaces reflect heat back into the atmosphere, is eliminated. Creating an urban environment where for some of the year at least it will be possible to walk outside and enjoy the outdoor experience that is so lacking elsewhere in the city.
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