The Team working in collaboration with Kling Stubbins of Philadelphia have won a Design Competition for a new community and club for expatriates on a 40 Hectare site, on the Salboukh Road in northern Riyadh.
A central strand of our response is our desire as a team to avoid mere repetition of the existing and established techniques that have been applied to date, in forming the existing expatriate ‘compounds’ offered in Riyadh. Our central objective to create the best expatriate community bar none requires the introduction of fresh ideas to the established model to ensure that the Diriyyah scheme genuinely becomes the market leader in the region. With this ethic in mind, we have sought to pursue the idea of a unique, living, organic, beautiful community first and to then ensure that the economic drivers behind the required program are met.
In our view, the contribution that can be made through Landscape Design to the overall sense of place sought in the Diriyyah proposal is paramount. This is particularly the case when considering the scale of the site, which is as many as four times the size of comparable schemes in Riyadh. This issue of scale makes it imperative to break the scheme into a succession of smaller, more intimate components, each of which will adopt specific characteristics and each of which will convey a unique sense of place that might otherwise occur in a community that has grown organically over a number of years.