A Kingdom on the Cutting Edge

Saudi Arabia’s transformation is advancing rapidly from an oil-dependent economy to a dynamic global nation with thriving tourism, finance, and entertainment sectors, driving a profound urban and architectural evolution. Meanwhile, the Kingdom is undergoing a once-in-a-century transition from car-dominant sprawl to high-density, mixed-use urbanism. By leveraging a data-driven approach to urban planning and decades of global architectural expertise, KPF is helping bridge the nation’s historical aesthetics and unique culture with its aspirations for the future, creating dense, vibrant urban ecosystems that respond intelligently to climate, social context and the Kingdom’s international image and brand.

Saudi Arabia’s transformation is advancing rapidly from an oil-dependent economy to a dynamic global nation with thriving tourism, finance, and entertainment sectors, driving a profound urban and architectural evolution. Meanwhile, the Kingdom is undergoing a once-in-a-century transition from car-dominant sprawl to high-density, mixed-use urbanism. By leveraging a data-driven approach to urban planning and decades of global architectural expertise, KPF is helping bridge the nation’s historical aesthetics and unique culture with its aspirations for the future, creating dense, vibrant urban ecosystems that respond intelligently to climate, social context and the Kingdom’s international image and brand.

The ongoing wave of development establishes a framework for the Kingdom to emerge as an economically diverse, environmentally sustainable, and culturally significant player on the world stage. Vision 20301—along with upcoming global sporting events such as the 2034 FIFA World Cup and cultural celebrations such as Expo 2030—plays a pivotal role in reshaping the built environment.

The youth-heavy demographic, shifting gender roles, and evolving social changes have fueled a growing demand for new mixed-use districts2, including a wide range of entertainment venues, residential neighborhoods, and commercial hubs—transforming Saudi Arabia from a regional center into a global destination for business and leisure.

Designing for flexibility is a fundamental challenge in a context where social behaviors and cultural expectations are shifting faster than physical infrastructure can adapt. How do we design spaces that adapt to different commercial uses over decades including flexibility in housing typologies to serve different household structures over time?

Context-Driven Design

As architects and urban planners, the current building boom presents both an extraordinary opportunity and a significant challenge: to synthesize Saudi cultural values and traditions with evolving patterns of urban development. While understanding and responding to the specifics of place is fundamental to our work globally, the Saudi context demands heightened sensitivity to how local culture, climate, and context shape aesthetic character, climate-responsive architecture, and urban form.

Opportunities to Set Zoning Standards

Urban regulation is still forming in many new development areas—meaning large-scale projects can effectively set precedent for zoning codes, land-use integration, and public realm mandates. Unlike mature planning systems (e.g., Europe), there is greater freedom to propose innovative urban codes that merge cultural principles, climate performance, and global best practices. This regulatory “blank slate” comes with long-term responsibility, that may shape not just single districts but future potential nationwide planning norms. It allows testing alternative mobility hierarchies, density frameworks, and mixed-use integration rules that could later be codified.

Innovation, Authenticity, and Craft

The Salmani architectural style, an influencer of developing codes, for example, as laid out by the King Salman Charter for Architecture and Urbanism, codifies a number of regionally specific architectural aesthetics that merge heritage styles with today’s demands for scale, performance, and material innovation. KPF’s approach is to reinterpret Salmani architecture within the context of individual projects, crafting designs that are authentic to the spirit of the code and to our contemporary sensibilities and drive to innovate.

Material Texture

In the Saudi context, our work emphasizes a materiality that celebrates solidity and permanence. Masonry materials not only impart a sense of weight and durability to buildings, but also address practical concerns such as solar heat gain and glare from the desert’s intense sun. Locally sourced materials—including adobe, pigmented concrete, Jeddah’s coral stone, and Riyadh’s sandstone—anchor each building in its regional identity. Applied across the scale of a new city, these materials create a unified and striking aesthetic experience, reinforcing a strong sense of place.

Contemporary Craft

Our forms and crafted details draw inspiration not only from the geometric intricacy of Islamic art, but also from the organic shapes found in the Arabian landscape—from the sweeping sand dunes of the desert and the mountains of the western coastal escarpment to the coral reefs of the Red Sea and the branching patterns of coastal mangrove forests. In select instances, design details reinterpret traditional elements, such as the Mashrabiya windows and intricately carved wooden mangour screens of Al-Balad4 in Jeddah, offering fresh perspectives on heritage forms.

By synthesizing local reference points with a global approach to high-performance design, we create solutions that are deeply rooted in context while setting new standards for energy efficiency and contemporary living.

New and Old Technologies

Our work also re-imagines ancient technologies in ways that are both contemporary and relevant. Riyadh’s arid climate, for example, is ideally suited to passive cooling strategies. Wind catchers—used throughout the Arab world for centuries—are reinterpreted through advanced design technology and climate modeling, resulting in high-performance wind towers that generate breezes and passively cool semi-enclosed spaces. Additionally, our mid-and low-rise, dense urban fabric is purpose-built to integrate photovoltaic solar panels (BIPV), producing zero-emission energy on-site and enhancing the usability of shaded rooftops.

Form and Climate

At the urban scale, we re-establish or create context from the ground up, drawing on contemporary reinterpretations of urban courtyard blocks and narrow, shaded streets—sikkas—that characterized an earlier era of urban development in Saudi Arabia. These forms perform exceptionally well within the local cultural and environmental context, creating networks that facilitate circulation while protecting pedestrians from intense sun and wind.

Courtyards5, in turn, allow blocks to define the public street edge while providing intimate, enclosed outdoor spaces, mediating between the desire for active street frontage and privacy. Along Saudi Arabia’s extensive coastlines, such as in Jeddah, we adapt these principles for new lifestyle districts by the sea, opening courtyards to the water to capture breezes and enhance thermal comfort. These human-centric approaches to urbanism are the “soft-power”, counterparts to the mega-scale of many of the projects.

City-Building for the Future

Rapid cultural and economic shifts in Saudi life over the past decade have transformed how people engage with their cities, creating new demands for urban public spaces and mixed-use districts that integrate living, working, and leisure. At KSFD in Riyadh, our work seeks to transform a large-scale open space into an actively programmed, thermally comfortable public environment, seamlessly connected by public transport and a comprehensive pedestrian network. With climate and culture influencing daily rhythms, the district is designed for cooler evenings, late-night leisure and flexible work hours. Our design approach prioritizes mobility networks that deemphasize the car in favor of pedestrians, micromobility, next-generation automated transportation6 technologies, and mass transit systems—all integral to our vision for a dynamic, accessible urban realm.

Central Social Districts

The design work to enhance the public realm is focused on creating thriving Central Social Districts (CSDs). Unlike gated residential compounds, isolated office enclaves, or private resorts, CSDs are balanced ecosystems—self-sustaining environments that bring together living, culture, commerce, hospitality, and entertainment with generous public spaces, seamless connectivity, and vibrant public areas. These mixed-use districts represent the future of economically sustainable urban environments worldwide and are essential to fulfilling Saudi Arabia’s ambitions for dynamic urban realms that serve as both local and global destinations.

Creating Neighborhoods

Coherence across all scales establishes a true sense of place—from the relationships between buildings that define neighborhoods and mobility networks, to the creation of protected outdoor spaces, and down to the smallest details such as tile selection and metal screen patterns. High-performance buildings and optimized site plans that shield users from the realities of a challenging climate are essential to the continued success of these environments.

By efficiently integrating multiple complementary building typologies and employing a rich, context-driven architectural language, we attract and engage users. Our approach, in which contextual response informs every aspect of a project, yields cohesive, efficient urban environments that will continue to shape the story of Saudi Arabia’s growth.