The Qiddiya Performing Arts Centre

Qiddiya City - Saudi Arabia

“A stage from another world, built for this world.”

The Qiddiya Performing Arts Centre is the first flagship cultural asset of Qiddiya City in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a city wholly dedicated to play and an epicenter of entertainment, sports, and culture. The project’s mission is to engender fresh interest in the performing arts among Saudi youth by providing pioneering new content for the 21st century, within a building designed as a massive, immersive stage.

The project presents a new model of ecological thinking. It lands on the ancient Tuwaiq cliffs, creating a vast shaded microclimate underneath, protecting people, animals, and plants from the sun and wind of the desert site. The building’s footprint is very small compared with its expansive structure above, creating vertiginous indoor/outdoor spaces and circulation flying far above the ground. Its radically open form, unlike the closed theater type of the 20th century, allows theater to spill out into the public realm.

The building’s megalithic slabs lean playfully on each other, like a scale model or a house of cards. They step down the cliffs, relating to the context in a surprising, raw way. Large black cuts connect the slabs together, creating moments of continuity across the discrete parts. Slabs and cuts together create an unfamiliar, alien silhouette against the sky.

The building’s form is mysterious and not immediately identifiable in terms of scale or origin. It might come from an ancient time or from the far future; its giant Chevron façade supercomponents appear out of sync with everyday forms of construction.

Qiddiya Performing Arts Centre exists as both a physical and a digital object, shifting in and out of relaxed daytime modes and dreamlike, glistening, technicolor modes. It is kind and happy, but also dark and full of wonder.

Project Team:

Client: Qiddiya Investment Company, Riyadh

Design Architect: Tom Wiscombe Architecture, Los Angeles
Principal: Tom Wiscombe, AIA
Senior Associates: Jamie Norden, Marrikka Trotter
Senior Project Architect: Kam Ku, AIA
Senior Designers: Jordan Micham, Binghao Yao, Yutao Chen, Shervin Hashemi
Project Designers: Panjing Zhu, Iris Gu, Wentao Pan, Chenglu Xue, Chengyu Zhang, Bobby Cheng, Dheer Talreja
Project Managers/ Job Captains: Eugenia Krassakopoulou, Jiahua Xi, Niyousha Zaribaf, Alvin Li, Daniela A Guerra, Charles Jacobs Jr., Suyue Jin, Matthew Pak
Model Supervisor: Dheer Talreja

Lead Design Consultant: Brewer Smith Brewer Group, Dubai
Managing Partner: Alistair McMillan
Senior Partners: Andrew Bereza, Scott Orwin
Partner: Nick Turbott
Director (Structures): Steven Bailey
Associate Director: Mark Vaughan
Lead Architects: Matthew Enirayetan, Harvey Hale, Bojan Stankovic
Head of Studio, Riyadh: Bart Leclercq

Consultants Structural (Design): Buro Happold SF
Structural (Executive): BSBG Dubai
MEP: Samadhin + Associates, Dubai
Facade Engineering: AESG, Dubai
Theatre Consultant: Theatre Projects, London
Civil, Geotechnical, CMES: Robert Bird Group, Dubai
Lighting: Fisher Marantz Stone, New York
Landscape: Studio Create, Dubai
Media: Display Devices, Denver
FLS Consultant: Design Confidence, Dubai
Vertical Transportation: VTME, Dubai
Acoustics: Inhabit, Dubai
Traffic: Transpo Group, Dubai
Signage: Genus Loci, Dubai
Sustainability: AESG, Dubai
Wind Engineering: RWDI, Dubai
Kitchen: SHW, Dubai
AV, ICT, ELV: Innovation, Dubai
Security: Design Security, UK, Consquare, Dubai
AOR: V3, Riyadh
Cost Planning: Omnium, Dubai