The embrace of time
The architect Jean Nouvel is currently creating a new resort in AlUla,
carved from the bare, sandstone rock of Arabia.
But he is also working with a much tougher material: time itself.
He says: “All architectures in the end do fight against time, and try
to resist time, before they become ruins and disappear”.
Waleed is design director of Afalula, the French agency for the development of AlUla and he has been instrumental in the development of the Journey Through Time masterplan. He is embedded in the team run by Samantha Cotterell, executive design director at the Royal Commission.
“My role is to oversee the development of the vision through architecture and design,” says Samantha. “I have a wonderful multi-cultural team of architects managing and directing a diverse portfolio of projects including Jean Nouvel’s carved architecture in the towering monolithic rocks in the national park of Sharaan, Giò Forma’s ‘land-architecture’ mirrored theatre in the desert canyon of Ashar and Kerry Hill Architects’ Aman Hotel on the edge of the UNESCO heritage site. Our work includes running international competitions to design museums in the oasis, an art district in an abandoned part of the old city and the redefinition and design of new urban spaces, exhibitions, events and even an AlUla gas station”.
The sandstone kingdom of Hegra
Architecture and Design
The architect, past winner of the Pritzker Prize, on his new Arabian adventure
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This is not a gated resort, nor a fenced-off reserve. AlUla is designed to bring out the explorer in everyone
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Waleed Shaalan – Design Director of Afalula
AlUla is such a powerful place, a cultural landscape shaped by nature and humans for millennia, it is not a place upon which to impose an architecture. AlUla guides the designer - if we observe, we will see. If we listen, we will hear. The purpose of design is to contribute to harmony and balance - it is to bring us closer to AlUla and AlUla closer to us
Samantha Cotterell
On how the lessons learned in shaping AlUla will resonate for many decades
AlUla is the kind of place designed, like the Maraya concert hall, to make
us reflect on our place within a landscape.
According to Samantha, that's a pressure, but a privilege too. Take the designers of the forthcoming Aman resort within Hegra itself: their work will be counterpointed with the exquisite carving and perspective of the Nabatean masterbuilders.
“The purpose here is not about architecture”, says Waleed. “We are not coming here to see the architecture. It is a means to an end. It is an enabler that makes me appreciate nature; it makes me listen to the site, feel the site
– and not isolate me from the site.”
“It changes a generation”
That requires visiting architects and designers to put aside their preconceptions about the desert environment, says Samantha, and invites them to a moment of stillness, immersed in the scale and wonder of AlUla. Architects arrive confident of their abilities and leave feeling humbled and having rethought and re-evaluated their approach to design and sometimes even to themselves. “It is not possible to fathom the spirituality that emanates from the land. In truth, it is nature itself who is our client,” she says. “It is not possible to fathom the spirituality that emanates from the land. In truth, it is nature itself who is our client”.
For Waleed, an encounter with this place requires a sense of humility that is not always a hallmark of his profession. But it’s one shared by Jean Nouvel, creator of the forthcoming Sharaan resort at AlUla. “It is an absolutely incredible privilege to be able to build in this place,” he says. “On this condition: to deepen the place with the greatest courtesy.” He, too, is uninterested in creating an instant (or Insta) sensation that is soon forgotten. “If you build an architecture that is destined to disappear in the next ten or 20 or 50 years, no one cares. But if you are interested in architecture that belongs to the place – and belonging is very important – that’s where we actually find ourselves”.
Read more
Artists, craftspeople and explorers of all kinds
are again finding inspiration in AlUla – including a female astronaut from the 25th century
The voyagers
ARTS AND CREATIVE INDUSTRIES
New York architect Basil Walter has been closely involved in building, preservation and designing events. We asked him to reflect on a very live question in architecture: are we designing for impact now, or with an eye
on future generations?
“The greenest way of building”
Basil Walter
Basil Walter AIA began his career as a painter before founding his architecture studio in 1984
The rise of the ‘outdoor museum’ has posed searching questions about the relationship between art and its relationship to the environment. In the UK, The Yorkshire Sculpture Park was created in the 550-acre parkland of Bretton Hall, an historic country house once visited by Henry VIII.
“The sculpture park occupies a landscape we know has been occupied for nearly a thousand years,” says head of curatorial programme, Helen Pheby. “Artists are fascinated by those layers of history and heritage and activity. Andy Goldsworthy did a major project in 2007 called Layered Land (see photograph, right). It was exactly that understanding: that this land had been built up over years and years; and that he could create something very contemporary with the materials that were around him on the estate.”
“It was a work that spoke to the future. I love all the infinite connections that can be made between the past, the present and the future.”
A journey through time in Yorkshire
Maraya, by Florian Boje of Gio Forma, Milan
It’s no small undertaking to create something as large and complex as a hotel within the living rock. Perhaps that’s why there are only a small number of underground and cave hotels around the world. The Desert Hotel In the Australian Outback opal mining town of Coober Pedy is one. In Cappadocia, Turkey, the Kayaki Premium Caves use 18th and 19th century houses carved from the rock, as do the Sextantio Le Grotte della Civita’s caves in the Italian town of Matera. Near Shanghai, the InterContinental group has created
a 17-storey hotel within a disused quarry, with rooms both above and below
the waterline.
Nothing will compare to the scale and technical challenge of the new Sharaan hotel in AlUla, due to open in 2024. But for Jean Nouvel, this is not breaking new ground. He looks for inspiration from the Nabatean architects, engineers and designers who fashioned the city of Dadan in the 1st century CE.
Welcome to the Hotel Nabatea
The Sharaan resort will be its own architectural time capsule
Within the rock: the new Sharaan resort
Nouvel says he was influenced by the way Nabateans interacted with their environment to reconnect to the earth and build sustainable habitats, allowing them to evade the summer’s heat and the cold of the winter
– especially in Hegra.
And as a modern architect working across the globe with a global range
of materials and styles, he might also nod to the cosmopolitanism of the Nabateans. They were primarily trading people. Hegra bears testimony
to their well-travelled designers, with stylistic elements from Assyria,
Phoenicia, Egypt and Hellenistic Alexandria.
Architecture is always evolving as different trends come and go. Now the
very word itself is being redesigned.
We now have ‘starchitect’ – the celebrities of the profession whose names
add glamour and dollars to any ambitious new project. We also have ‘marketecture’ – using building as a publicity tool for your project, your brand, even your nation.
The latest evolutionary cycle has seen architects recruited to provide fodder for the Instagram social network. Buildings that look like fish, bridges that look like hands, structures in all kinds of electric and candy colours in unlikely locations – if you are a tourist board wondering how to raise your profile, you may well dream of such things.
But not the design team at the Royal Commission for AlUla.
The rise of the ‘outdoor museum’ has posed searching questions about the relationship between art and its relationship to the environment. In the UK, The Yorkshire Sculpture Park was created in the 550-acre parkland of Bretton Hall, an historic country house
once visited by Henry VIII.
“The sculpture park occupies a landscape we know has been occupied for nearly a thousand years,” says Head of Curatorial Programme, Helen Pheby (above). “Artists are fascinated by those layers of history and heritage and activity. Andy Goldsworthy did a major project in 2007 called Layered Land (see photograph, left). It was exactly that understanding: that this land had been built up over years and years; and that he could create something very contemporary with the materials that were around him on the estate.”
“It was a work that spoke to the future. I love all the infinite connections that can be made between the past, the present and the future.”
But inside his new Sharaan resort, perhaps you will feel beyond time. “Being in the rock is like being in space – a state of levitation,” says Nouvel “It opens up formal and spatial possibilities that would not be possible anywhere else”.
The designers working in this ancient landscape are acutely aware of that weight of time. They want to resist trends and fashion and build, as much
as humans can build, to last.
ARTS AND CREATIVE INDUSTRY
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Nora Aldabal – Arts and Creative Planning Director of the RCU
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Can any new large-scale tourism project have sustainability at its heart? AlUla could be a test case – and a model
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Why AlUla is seeking investors who have something more than a return on capital on their minds
Past and future returns
Finance and Investment
Read more
How will AlUla balance development with the protection of its human and natural heritage?
Room to roam
Nature and Heritage
Read more
This is not a gated resort, nor a fenced-off reserve. AlUla is designed to bring out the explorer in everyone
An open secret
Tourism and hospitality
Read more
Artists, craftspeople and explorers of all kinds are again finding inspiration in AlUla – including a female astronaut from the 25th century
The voyagers
ARTS AND CREATIVE INDUSTRIES
Click to explore
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Can any new large-scale tourism project have sustainability at its heart? AlUla could be a test case – and a model
Riddle in the sands
iNFRASTRUCTURE AND CITY BUILDING
For Samantha Cotterell, Executive Director of Design for the Royal Commission for AlUla, the theme running through her career is 'nation building' and the contribution architecture and design makes.
“The purpose here is not about architecture”, says Waleed. “We are not coming here to see the architecture. Architecture is a means to an end. It is an enabler that makes me appreciate nature; it makes me listen to the site, feel the site – and not isolate me from the site”.
For Samantha Cotterell, executive director of design for the Royal Commission for AlUla, “The development that is being undertaken in AlUla will change a generation and AlUla forever. It will also have the opportunity to influence thinking in architecture and design globally, exhorting the international community to reconsider our role in the environment and our relationship with nature. That's a pressure, but a privilege too, “It comes with a great sense of responsibility to design and build with utmost awareness”.
The RCU has launched an international competition entitled ‘Architects
in Residence - 100 Architects for 100 Houses’, challenging an invited group
of global designers to create innovative and sustainable dwellings that
honour AlUla’s unique nature, heritage and culture; while defining a
new architecture.
Sculpted by wind, crafted by humanity: the AlUla landscape
The Design Gallery by S.Cotterell and Florian Boje for RCU Design Studio
The Valdes sculpture in the AlUla airport
Maraya, by Florian Boje of Giò Forma, Milan
Lita Albuquerque’s installation
NAJMA (She Placed One Thousand Suns Over the Transparent Overlays of Space)
It’s no small undertaking to create something as large and complex as a hotel within the living rock. Perhaps that’s why there are only
a small number of underground and cave hotels around the world. The Desert Hotel In the Australian Outback opal mining town of Coober Pedy is one. In Cappadocia, Turkey, the Kayaki Premium Caves use 18th and 19th century houses carved from the rock, as do
the Sextantio Le Grotte della Civita’s caves in the Italian town of Matera. Near Shanghai,
the InterContinental group has created a
17-storey hotel within a disused quarry, with rooms both above and below the waterline.
Nothing will compare to the scale and technical challenge of the new Sharaan hotel in AlUla, due to open in 2024. But for Jean Nouvel, this is not breaking new ground.
He looks for inspiration from the Nabatean architects, engineers and designers who fashioned the city of Dadan in the 1st
century CE.
AlUla Architecture New Gallery
That requires visiting architects and designers to put aside their preconceptions about the desert environment, says Samantha, and invites them to a moment of stillness, immersed in the scale and wonder of AlUla. Architects arrive confident of their abilities and leave feeling humbled and having rethought and re-evaluated their approach to design and sometimes even to themselves. “You can’t understand the scale of the great canyons and the vastness of the oasis unless you’re here: no photograph or video can give you that sense of space, the light, the sounds,” she says. “It is not possible to fathom the spirituality that emanates from the land. In truth, it is nature itself who is our client”.
For Waleed, an encounter with this place requires a sense of humility that is not always a hallmark of his profession. But it’s one shared by Jean Nouvel, creator of the forthcoming Sharaan resort at AlUla. “It is an absolutely incredible privilege to be able to build in this place,” he says. “On this condition: to deepen the place with the greatest courtesy.” He, too, is uninterested in creating an instant (or Insta) sensation that is soon forgotten. “If you build an architecture that is destined to disappear in the next ten or 20 or 50 years, no one cares. But if you are interested in architecture that belongs to the place – and belonging is very important – that’s where we actually find ourselves”.
“It changes a generation”
Waleed is design director of Afalula, the French agency for the development of AlUla and he has been instrumental in the development of the Journey Through Time masterplan. He is embedded in the team run by Samantha Cotterell, executive design director at the Royal Commission.
“My role is to oversee the development of the vision through architecture and design,” says Samantha. “I have a wonderful multi-cultural team of architects managing and directing a diverse portfolio of projects including Jean Nouvel’s carved architecture in the towering monolithic rocks in the national park of Sharaan, Giò Forma’s ‘land-architecture’ mirrored theatre in the desert canyon of
Ashar and Kerry Hill Architects’ Aman Hotel on the edge of the UNESCO heritage site.
Our work includes running international competitions to design museums in the oasis, an art district in an abandoned part of the old city and the redefinition and design of new urban spaces, exhibitions, events and even an AlUla gas station”.
‘We are working with a mix of in-house, international and local designers to extricate an architecture that is always inspired by the natural beauty that is the context of AlUla.’
The desert is an environment that is at once harsh, eternal, resilient and yet rich and incredibly fragile. “You walk into canyons in winter and find a fine blanket of white
flowers covering the sand,” says Waleed.
“That delicate, delicate, layer of life can be disrupted very easily.”
Waleed Shaalan – Design director of Afalula
Waleed Shaalan – Design Director of Afalula
AlUla is such a powerful place,
a cultural landscape shaped by nature and humans for millennia, it is not a place upon which to impose an architecture. AlUla guides the designer - if we observe, we will see. If we listen, we will hear. The purpose of design is to contribute to harmony and balance - it is
to bring us closer to AlUla
and AlUla closer to us
‘We are working with a mix of in-house, international and local designers to extricate an architecture that is always inspired by the natural beauty that is the context of AlUla.’
The desert is an environment that is at once harsh, eternal, resilient and yet rich and incredibly fragile. “You walk into canyons in winter and find a fine blanket of white flowers covering the sand,” says Waleed. “That delicate, delicate, layer of life can be disrupted very easily.”
You can’t understand the scale of the great canyons and the vastness of the oasis unless you’re here: no photograph or
video can give you that sense of space, the light, the sounds
Samantha Cotterell – Executive Design Director at the Royal Commission for AlUla
Samantha Cotterell
On how the lessons learned in shaping AlUla will resonate for many decades
Read more
Artists, craftspeople and explorers of all kinds are again finding inspiration in AlUla – including a female astronaut from the 25th century
The voyagers
ARTS AND CREATIVE INDUSTRIES
The Design Gallery in
AlJadidah, Art District in the making
The Design Gallery in
AlJadidah, Art District in the making
The Design Gallery in
AlJadidah, Art District in the making
The Design Gallery in
AlJadidah, Art District in the making
The Design Gallery in
AlJadidah, Art District in the making
The Design Gallery by S.Cotterell and Florian Boje for RCU Design Studio
The Design Gallery by S.Cotterell and Florian Boje for RCU Design Studio
Kerry Hill Architects’ Aman Hotel
The approach to the newly expanded AlUla airport, by Dabbagh Architects
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