Esnad Riyadh office

An office designed for 300 people, then asked to hold 400, then 550, does not have a space problem. It has a planning problem. The Esnad commission was a study in how spatial organization — rather than additional square meters — can resolve the pressure that growth places on a working environment.

The project operated within the constraints of a leased building — an existing structural envelope that could not be modified at the level of its core architecture. This constraint made the design brief considerably sharper. The question was not what to build, but how to redistribute what already existed: how to read the movement patterns of a company whose staff spectrum runs from ministers to directors to administrative personnel, map the friction points in its daily circulation, and redesign the spatial distribution to serve a population far larger than the building was originally configured for — without compromising the working conditions of any individual across that range.

Location          Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Client            Esnad Company
Type              Office Interior — Spatial Reorganization
Existing Capacity 300 employees
Design Capacity   400 employees / 550 by 2025
Status            Completed
Year              2024
Principal         Ibrahim Nawaf Joharji
Scope             Space Planning, Circulation Analysis, Interior Design

The design process began with the company’s history and growth trajectory rather than with the existing floor plan. Understanding how Esnad’s administrative structure had evolved — how its departments relate to one another, where cross-team collaboration recurs and where autonomy is essential, how the hierarchy from senior officials to support staff creates different spatial requirements within the same working day — produced a functional map before any spatial decision was made. The movement simulation that followed tested circulation flow through the existing transit routes against the projected staff density, identifying the points at which the building’s current organization would produce congestion and inefficiency at full occupancy.

The spatial redistribution was governed by two principles that operated in parallel. The first was that the design must serve every level of the institution with the same spatial quality — a democratic design approach that treats the minister’s need for a focused and private working environment and the staff member’s need for clear circulation and accessible collaboration space as requirements of equal value rather than as a hierarchy of spatial investment. The second was that the building must accommodate its 2025 user count without a second redesign — the planning should absorb the anticipated growth rather than respond to it when it arrives.

Algorithmic space planning was used to optimize the distribution of workstations, meeting rooms, and collaboration zones based on the density maps produced by the movement simulation. The algorithms identified configurations that minimize circulation conflicts, balance the distance from workstations to shared amenities across the full floor plate, and maintain acoustic separation between focused work areas and the collaborative spaces that the company’s culture requires. The result is a spatial organization that the building’s existing structure can support at 550 occupants without producing the congestion and spatial ambiguity that unplanned growth generates in office environments.

The design methodology governing this type of data-driven space planning is detailed in how-we-work. For companies managing growth within existing building envelopes and seeking a spatial reorganization that anticipates that growth rather than reacting to it, the engagement framework is outlined in bespoke-architecture.