“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.