Riyadh Vista

There is a specific moment in wearing the Saudi bisht that takes approximately 1.2 seconds. The left hand rises, the right passes beneath it, a loop forms, and the garment settles into its final position across the shoulders. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has performed this movement in a way that has acquired cultural significance — a gesture that expressed something in Saudi identity that language had not yet named. The Riyadh Vista proposal translated that movement into the organizational form of a public civic landscape.

The site occupies a promontory at the edge of a wadi within the Saudi capital — a topographically active piece of land that descends toward Wadi Hanifah while opening simultaneously onto Riyadh’s skyline. The competition brief, submitted to Riyadh Municipality, called for a multi-use public destination capable of functioning as a cultural, commercial, recreational, and civic landmark. The proposal organized the entire site around a single planning decision: a primary axis of 550 meters following the longest possible line across the land, extending from the project’s urban entrance to the wadi overlook at its far end. Everything else distributes along and around this organizational spine.

Location          Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Client            Riyadh Municipality
Type              Public Civic Landscape — Competition Entry
Primary Axis      550 m
Built Coverage    25% of site area
Status            Competition Proposal
Year              2024
Principal         Ibrahim Nawaf Joharji
Scope             Urban Design, Pavilion Architecture, Landscape, Cultural Infrastructure

The bisht’s draping movement was translated into architectural geometry through two parametric equations. The horizontal displacement of the left hand toward the sleeve follows the rotation equation x1=x0·cos(θ)−y0·sin(θ), while the vertical rise of that same movement follows y1=x0·sin(θ)+y0·cos(θ). These equations describe the arc and elevation of the garment as it settles into its draped position. Applied to the site’s horizontal axes, they generate the organic curved forms of the pavilion — not as a symbolic reference to the movement, but as its direct geometric consequence. The pavilion is the bisht’s movement fixed in concrete and steel at architectural scale.

The 550-meter promenade forms the project’s organizational spine and its primary civic proposition. It begins at the urban threshold — fully shaded, accessible, and designed for inclusive use along its entire length — then traverses the site’s stepped landscape toward the wadi edge. Along its route it passes each of the project’s programmatic zones in sequence: the mosque plaza, the commercial and food pavilion, the wadi swing zone, the camping terraces, and the panoramic overlook at the far end. This sequence is not incidental. It follows the site’s topography, where the ground rises and falls in gradients that the design reads rather than flattens, the path tracing the contour lines that the wadi’s geography has established over centuries.

The mosque plaza occupies a position of precise urban significance within the plan. It is oriented toward the qibla — the direction of Makkah — and its open court faces this direction as a formal civic gesture rather than a functional afterthought. The plaza operates as the site’s gravitational center, the point at which the promenade’s civic character is expressed most completely, and where the project’s relationship to Riyadh’s religious and cultural identity is declared most clearly. The triangular form governing the pavilion’s architecture reappears here as the plaza’s organizational shape, its three-layered triangular section referencing the density and architectural identity of Riyadh’s urban environment in a register that reads simultaneously local and contemporary.

The wadi swing zone sits at the site’s geographic center, at the midpoint of the promontory above the wadi, and operates as the proposal’s most experiential element. It is the moment in the promenade sequence at which the visitor’s attention shifts from the path underfoot to the landscape overhead and below. The swing activates the wadi view physically rather than passively: the body in motion, the horizon shifting, the wadi visible below, and Riyadh’s skyline visible through it simultaneously. This is the project’s wadi moment — the spatial equivalent of the bisht’s loop, where the movement of a single element reveals the full extent of the space surrounding it.

The skiing and skating zones are positioned along the site’s stepped slopes, their orientation and surface specifications calculated against the topographic conditions that the contour analysis produced. Camping areas are distributed across terraces at varying elevations reaching up to six levels, each terrace providing its occupants with privacy and a view angle distinct from the one below it. Restaurants and food and beverage outlets are placed along the pavilion’s commercial zone, with direct vehicle access from the site’s perimeter road, their investment value determined by their position between the promenade’s pedestrian movement and the wadi overlook as a destination. The 25% built coverage limit specified within the competition parameters was distributed across these programs to maximize the landscape-to-footprint ratio, so that green space constitutes the dominant material of the site and buildings read as access points within a continuous outdoor experience rather than as its primary content.

The pavilion is the proposal’s primary architectural element. Its form — derived from the bisht equations, calibrated to the site’s primary and secondary axes, and oriented toward Riyadh’s architectural landmarks to the south — functions as a porous inclined structure that uses solid mass and carved air passages rather than glass facades to moderate its thermal environment. The slots and openings that produce the pavilion’s external rhythm are passive ventilation devices: they direct air through the structure, create shade on interior surfaces, and reduce the solar gain that a fully enclosed building of equivalent footprint would accumulate. The building breathes through its form before any mechanical system is required to support that outcome.

The material and color palette was drawn from Riyadh’s urban environment and its desert ground: warm limestone tones, exposed concrete on the wadi-facing elements, and planting species selected for their compatibility with the site’s arid conditions. The project’s visual identity reads as belonging to this specific piece of land rather than as imported from a global design vocabulary. That is the argument that the bisht’s movement makes about Saudi identity — that the contemporary and the inherited are not in tension, but are the same thing expressed differently in different moments. The Riyadh Vista proposal makes the same argument in plan and section.

The urban planning methodology and cultural research approach that produced this proposal are detailed in how-we-work. The environmental performance and landscape principles embedded in the site design form part of the framework described under sustainability. For municipalities and public bodies considering civic landscape commissions of comparable cultural and programmatic ambition, the collaborative engagement framework is outlined in bespoke-architecture.