Project Description
Out of the financial district’s urban master plan, the KAFD Conference Center emerges as an iconic structure. Representative of the local “Wadi” landscape, HM White’s design fuses landscape and structure. Re-introducing native grasses and flora into a large scale public space setting, indigenous plant communities spatially organize and blur the boundaries between the building’s undulating “exoskeleton” skin and its surrounding landscape.
The future of Saudi Arabia’s public landscape will indefinitely be influenced by this project’s sustainable demonstration of viable “green” design strategies within a public domain and its renewed reconnection with the country’s ecological heritage.
A custom hypertufa growing medium emulates the regional limestone cliff growing conditions. Flexibility to deploy cliff dwelling plants in a modular form across the center’s varied planes and surfaces enables the vegetation and hypertufa to mimic the desert landscape.