At the Diriyah Gate Development Authority headquarters northwest of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, three adjoining rooms house projection-mapped scale models of a city currently under construction.
The models glow in sync with promotional videos that collapse centuries of history into a few looping minutes. “This is the original birthplace and home of Al Saud, the ruling family,” said Diriyah’s chief marketing officer, Kiran Haslam.
Haslam took his audience back to the year 400, tracing Diriyah’s origins to the Banu Hanifa tribe, who settled along a nearby wadi that provided intermittent fresh water in an otherwise unforgiving landscape. After centuries as a modest settlement, the site gained regional significance in the early eighteenth century as the birthplace and capital of Muhammad bin Saud Al Muqrin, who rose to dominate Arabia through a combination of military power and his alliance with religious leader Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.
“The richness of longevity, the richness of agriculture, the richness of royalty have existed here over a very, very long span of time,” Haslam insisted. “That is why we are doing this project.”
He jumped to the present. “We have over 25 hotels, and with them, everything you would imagine.” He listed them quickly: St. Regis, Four Seasons, Armani, Corinthia, Ritz-Carlton—and budget options, Radisson and Moxy. The point, he explained, is to offer not only “ultra, ultra luxury” but options across “all budgets and price points.” A similar logic, it seems, governs the choice of architects. “Don’t ask if we’ve worked with an architect,” he added. “We’ve worked with them all. Foster + Partners, Zaha Hadid, Snøhetta, HKS. You name it.”
Diriyah’s Promise
Conceived in 2018 as part of then-ascendant Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Vision 2030, Diriyah is being developed by Diriyah Company, an entity owned by the Public Investment Fund (PIF) and charged with planning, financing, and delivering the $63 billion giga-project. Their aim is to produce a contemporary urban environment that draws on the site’s history as a pre-modern capital, and repackages it as a global, heritage-themed destination. More
By Steven Sculco ARCHPAPER
