Museum of the Built Environment

We designed the Museum of the Built Environment, one of six projects within the King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD), a new 55-million-square-foot, mixed-use urban community. The building is sited on a large plaza bisected by a sunken Wadi, a pedestrian park. Over 340,000 square feet of permanent and temporary exhibition space will feature works related to arts and architecture in the Arabian Peninsula. The permanent collection is organized by a series of interconnected spaces around a cascade of viewing ramps. The lower floors of the museum knit together a series of public areas, skywalks to adjacent buildings, a monorail station, and street-level retail culminating in a grand three-story atrium. Other programmatic elements include a 150-seat auditorium, a destination restaurant, and a terrace.

The Saudi Arabian world heritage sites of Madain Saleh and At-Turaif inspired the museum's chiseled, crystalline form. The building's exterior cladding expresses its programmatic functions; the lower public floors are transparent, while upper levels are opaquer, clad with prismatic laminated glass panels which create a varied textural quality and allow daylight to penetrate at controlled locations. The museum was designed to meet LEED Silver certification guidelines.