Tall & Urban News

Cultural Center Asserts Creativity and Innovation in Dhahran

Saudi Photoshop
Saudi Photoshop
10 April 2019 | Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

Designed by Norwegian firm Snøhetta, the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, is in its final stages of completion. The center, which goes by “Ithra” (in Arabic, meaning “enrichment”) started as a library but grew into a far more ambitious multi-use complex, covering over one million interior square feet (92,903 square meters).

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It is a gift to the people of Saudi Arabia from the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco), to mark the 75th anniversary of its founding. Snøhetta won the commission in 2007, just before the firm earned international renown with its glacier-inspired Oslo Opera House.

After a series of delays, the center was dedicated in December 2016 and opened in stages during the following two years (landscaping work continues today). It is not only Saudi Arabia’s first bona fide work of “starchitecture”; it is also, by some measure, the kingdom’s first attempt at a tourist attraction. It is open, at no charge, to all Saudi citizens and visitors—though the kingdom does not issue tourist visas, and business visas are tightly controlled.

Ithra occupies a rise on the northern edge of the company’s headquarters, near Dammam and not far from the “Prosperity Well” that started the oil boom in 1938. Overlooking tanks, pipes, and other trappings of the petroleum industry, it is an inauspicious site for an extravagant work of architecture. Dammam is largely a bedroom community for tens of thousands of Saudi Aramco employees—a sea of cinder blocks along the Persian Gulf that features little in the way of a city center and essentially no cultural amenities.

Public institutions in Saudi Arabia have grown especially scarce since 1979, when the kingdom turned to a socially conservative version of Wahhabism. The country’s most notable museums are Riyadh’s National Museum and the Masmak Fort, the now-restored historic site that Ibn Saud captured in 1902, establishing what would become the Saudi dynasty. Much of Saudi social life, at least among wealthier classes, takes place in private, behind the walls of lavish residential compounds. Ithra aspires to change that dynamic, championing the sort of cultural creativity and innovation that has long been frowned upon in conservative Saudi society.

The design of the complex draws loosely on geology—a cross between programmatic design and abstraction, with echoes of Zaha Hadid’s fondness for curves and Daniel Libeskind, FAIA’s fondness for clashing geometries. Comprised of six buildings, the tallest rising to 18 stories, Ithra is meant to resemble a pile of stones smoothed by desert winds and arranged organically yet harmoniously, as if in a Zen garden. No two views of the center are exactly alike; only the central “Knowledge Tower” is visible from all angles. Each of the “stones” is clad in over 200 miles (322 kilometers) of pipe—4-inch (10-centimeter) metal tubes that cover nearly the entire exterior and some interior ceilings and walls.

The main entrance is a tunnel that extends horizontally some 65 feet (20 meters) down before opening up into the complex’s centerpiece, the vast Great Hall. Its concrete walls are artificially weathered to resemble rammed earth, one of the only durable building materials in pre-modern Saudi Arabia.

The five main public components of Ithra—the museum, library, conference center, cinema, and performing arts hall—draw on various stylistic tropes, but each clean and modern. The convention hall is a pillow-shaped structure with a domed ceiling that spans a multipurpose space for banquets, lectures, and the like. Perforated copper siding covers the walls and ceiling; backlighting creates a celestial effect that makes the entire room feel like a planetarium.

The library—futuristically clad in bone-white paneling—sits directly above the Great Hall. Visitors access it by escalator, to dramatic effect. Its three levels surround an atrium that overlooks the hall, reminiscent of the Guggenheim Museum in New York (and of Snøhetta’s new Calgary Central Library).

The proscenium-style performing arts space has semicircular balconies that hang over the orchestra section, giving it the feel of a diminutive opera house. The cinema, in contrast with the theater’s crimson color scheme, is a sea of vibrant multicolored seats.

The museum is located entirely below grade, descending three levels, each level going progressively further back in time—contemporary art, then historical decorative arts and artifacts, and finally natural history displays, including animated projections that turn entire rooms into habitats for primordial beasts. The museum surrounds an atrium that is Ithra’s most explicit homage to petroleum. The floor is tiled in black and features a replica of the rigging for the original Prosperity Well.

Ithra is an ode to innovation as much as anything else, and that’s reflected in the “Do Tank,” an egg-shaped space that will host students and entrepreneurs who are developing everything from business plans to gadgets. Groups will present their products in a small lecture hall and can develop them in a lab with 3D printers.

Exhilaration for the project is tempered by perceptions of Saudi Arabia’s social strictures and reputation for human rights abuses. Architecture critic Josh Stephens is skeptical of the centers promise to spread knowledge and promote understanding: “As impressive as Ithra is, it is still a bauble. As welcoming as Ithra is, it is still a barbed-wire-ringed compound. As cosmopolitan as Ithra is, it is still a tourist attraction in a country that does not admit tourists.”

He further suggests that it represents “a true test of architecture’s ability to promote social change. As one of the only venues for (relatively) free thinking in the kingdom, it will either help inspire a nationwide movement for more open minds, or it will help burnish the kingdom’s reputation while atrocities persist behind closed doors.”

For more on this story see Planetizen and Sonhetta.