Arab News, Sunday, Feb 05, 2023 | Rajab 14, 1444
Saudi Arabia, GCC taking holistic, far-sighted approach to city building, expert says
Saudi Arabia: Saudi Arabia and the
Gulf region have seen a significant shift in the concept of city building with
modernized infrastructure plans taking into account ways to improve people’s
lives and experiences as opposed to “purely a functional response,” according to
a UK-based architecture expert.
“It’s all about how can you create a terrific
sense of being in a city and having a great experience,” said Daniel Hajjar,
managing principal for Europe and the Middle East at HOK — a global architecture
and engineering firm.
“Particularly in Saudi Arabia, you’re seeing a lot
more use of those types of facilities, because there’s a lot more encouragement
to sort of knock down both physical and figurative walls within the Kingdom. And
I think that’s a very good thing, as it’s only a matter of time before you will
begin to see, and you’re already seeing it, much more engagement from Saudis in
their own country,” he told Arab News in a recent exclusive interview.
HOK, which has been engaged with the Kingdom since
the 1970s, has designed several iconic projects, including the 80-story PIF
Tower, which is the tallest of the five structures that make up the financial
plaza of the King Abdullah Financial District and symbolizes “the dawn of a new
era of financial leadership” within the Saudi capital.
The US-based firm, which was founded in 1955 in
Missouri, began to officially expand its footprint in the Middle East in the
early 1980s, and the first major project where the company brought a lot of its
talent to complex designs was in Saudi Arabia. It was King Khalid Airport, King
Saud University and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran
that changed the way it operated as a firm, Hajjar explained.
“Those were sort of the first two institutes of
higher education within the Kingdom that really propelled Saudi on the
international stage that they began developing this fundamental infrastructure,
and as a result, HOK was instrumental in delivering that, as well as the
airport,” he said.
The company also developed other high-profile
projects, among them King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and King
Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center in Saudi Arabia. Others included
the National Assembly building and the Central Bank headquarters in Kuwait, Abu
Dhabi National Oil Company corporate headquarters, Dubai Marina, and the
masterplan for Dubai Expo 2020.
Hajjar said that the Kingdom’s projects have
always challenged the company to develop the way they work, and have invested
heavily in technology to deliver massive and complex Lead in Energy and
Environmental Design Platinum projects within months, and the first of their
kind in the region.
Focus on future generations
Saudi Vision 2030 “is incredibly ambitious, and
because of that, it raises the bar significantly in terms of what is it that’s
going to drive that economy, post-oil, or post-hydrocarbon, because that is
going to happen, and this diversification of the economy,” he said.
“Those master plans that are being done now are
not necessarily for the generation today, but they’re for future generations to
use, and master plans, by their very nature change and evolve over time. So as a
result, we believe that setting a framework in place where you have the ability
to engage people along the journey is incredibly important, because … they’re
part of that evolution (and) it is part of their genetic DNA, if you will, but
within the country,” Hajjar said.
When designing projects, Hajjar said it was
important to ensure they had cultural or physical relevance, and to interpret
natural and heritage aspects into a modern form.
“A lot of the architecture that is being produced,
within Riyadh and perhaps within the Najd area in particular, this whole aspect
of Salmani architecture or Salmani expression, seeking an expression that is
genuine for the region, as opposed to looking at something in a pastiche manner.
“So as a result, you’re beginning to see much more
authentic architecture, without copying the past, and look at a modern
interpretation of those historic principles behind the architecture has a
tremendously valuable proposition.”
Comparing Riyadh and Jeddah, he said that they
were two totally different cities because they grew based on different
parameters when they were established.
“If you look at Jeddah and the way the Al-Balad
part of Jeddah has sort of grown out further from the original port, and then if
you look at Riyadh as being the capital of the Kingdom, very much different in
terms of the approach to city building between the two of them, and it doesn’t
mean that one’s necessarily better than the other.
“Because there wasn’t as much of an economic boom
in Jeddah, it sort of boomed and then it slowed down and then they didn’t simply
just build. I think Riyadh now is looking at the various initiatives, in terms
of greening Riyadh, public art, and creating that level of richness, while
Jeddah has had international art exhibits along the Corniche,” he said.
These also differ from new developments such as
the NEOM megacity project or Diriyah Gate, which is the birthplace of the first
Saudi state and now everything is leveraging off that historic core as they
begin to build out from there, he said.
The big challenge with Saudi Arabia is it is so
geographically diverse from one region to the next, so how do you begin bringing
those cultures together within the Kingdom and ensure “the richness that occurs
in one region should be introduced to the richness from another in order to
create this fantastic mosaic that is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” he said.
Another major challenge is the future of
transportation, and there will be a strong focus on linking cities together
within the Kingdom and the Gulf region and cutting down on air travel carbon
footprint.
“The irony behind all of this is pre-World War I,
there was a railway in the Kingdom, and now there is no railway. So I think
you’re going to begin seeing a lot of that, particularly GCC-wide (and) it’s
going to serve the function of transporting commodities and everything else, but
at the same time, they have the ability to encourage people to travel by rail
and I think that will come,” he said.
Cities mature when they begin introducing
large-scale infrastructure projects that help people live in it, and a decade in
terms of the city’s life is not a very long time at all, Hajjar said, as the
Vision 2030 target ambitions rapidly approach.
“Ultimately, a city has a continuum to it,” he
said, “because when a city stops to develop and stops challenging itself, it
slowly begins to lose meaning to people within the city. You have to continually
reinvent the city, bring new things into the city, and have people engaged in
different ways.”