In a Desert Think Tank, Woozy Forms Are Inspired by Nature

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — A decade and a king ago, Saudi Arabia started talking about, of all things, energy conservation, global warming and clean alternatives to oil.

Under King Abdullah, the state’s oil company, Saudi Aramco, began planning for the construction of a think tank to strategize the country’s oil future and economic diversification. In 2009, Aramco held a competition to design a campus in Riyadh — a state-of-the-industry architectural icon that would embody the research center’s mission and double as a showcase where conferences by OPEC and others could be held while BBC cameras rolled.

The winner was the Iraq-born Zaha Hadid, the sole female architect invited into the competition and an outspoken progressive defining an image for a country that the king was cautiously changing. Her design for the King Abdullah Petroleum and Research Center unveiled to the public this past fall, was geometrically ingenious, inspired by soap bubbles and honeycombs found in nature.

But its public opening during the country’s annual Saudi Design Week in October proved to be posthumous for Abdullah as well as for Hadid. He died in 2015, to be succeeded by his half brother, the 79-year-old King Salman. Hadid died a year later, at 65, of a heart attack. She never saw the completion of one of the most singular designs of her career, the first in her portfolio to be data-driven by the demands of climate and sustainability.

Many grandly conceived Saudi projects have never fully materialized, often because new rulers lacked interest in initiatives started by, and named after, their predecessors. But construction was substantially complete by the time of Abdullah’s death, and despite the throne’s passing to a rival branch of the royal family, 135 full-time researchers and support staff now occupy the offices of an operational building, with room for more experts as the institute develops over time. An independent endowment assures the center’s full funding in perpetuity.

The mandate for the competition was to plan a building with a low carbon footprint for a scorching climate that necessitates air-conditioning much of the year. The 113-degree summers drove the design. Rather than just carpeting the roof with solar panels, plugging in sustainability as an afterthought, Hadid integrated energy-conserving forms into the design.

Working closely with DaeWha Kang, then the office’s design director, Hadid turned to nature for lessons. “When you look deeply at nature, you find out why things look the way they look,” Kang said. “You find systems that respond to environmental conditions that result in the forms you see.”

Their research included sponges, leaves and the skins of reptiles. They found that the cellular geometry of soap bubbles and honeycombs reappeared throughout nature because they pack efficiently. “That’s when the idea of cellular, hexagonal shell structures arranged around courtyards came to us,” Kang said.

Some environmental strategies were as simple and old as biology. “We found that so much of the genius of nature is passive design,” he said. The architects also looked at the country’s traditional earthen structures for passive solar techniques. They clad the shells of their honeycomb with heat-reflective glass-fiber concrete panels, with an airspace beneath to insulate the spaces inside. In the courtyards, they used stone paving and concrete panels to retain coolness.

In the 1980s, before three-dimensional software, Hadid sometimes swished drawings on the glass top of Xerox machines as the light tumbler rolled, to kill the stiffness in designs: She was interested in movement. For the research center, computers programmed for energy conservation did the same, distorting the hexagons, a rational process producing woozy but climate-efficient forms.

The architects configured hexagonal office labs around hexagonal courtyards, and as the building moved toward the desert, they graduated the size of the cells to house the library, auditorium, data farm and mosque. Computers stretched and distorted each pavilion and courtyard to capture shade from the south and prevailing breezes from the north. The construction lines of the facade panels stretched over their steel frames. At the outskirts of the capital, pointed toward the desert — and Mecca — the building seemed ready to move.

A small, jewel-perfect mosque at the desert end terminates the long, central courtyard, its ceiling covered by a filigreed, computer-generated pattern that recalls traditional arabesque motifs. The mosque is among the few anywhere designed by a woman. A talent at least equal to her male competitors and a feminist role model for women, especially in the Arab world, Hadid represented a progressive wing of Arab culture. In a country where most women wear the veil and abaya in public, Hadid was more partial, actually, to fashions by Issey Miyake and Yoshii Yamamoto. Her victory in the competition dovetailed with the agenda of a king who, in 2009, founded the coed King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Jeddah, where men and women mixed freely on an environmentally green campus, attending classes together.

Susan Kearton, a spokeswoman for the research center, said its mission to find the most productive use of energy for economic and social progress aligns with “Vision 2030,” which the kingdom’s heir apparent, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, recently put forward to diversify and develop the economy away from oil.

The center was Hadid’s first design to be driven entirely on the basis of sustainability, but she did not surrender her design passport when she entered the competition. In a culture where architectural traditions can separate the sexes, Hadid used her characteristically fluid spaces to break down barriers and encourage social mixing. During Design Week last fall, women and men, students and princes mingled freely, sharing food and conversation in common spaces. Veils were optional.

When the project started in 2009, Abdullah was already 85 and ailing, and there was strong pressure to complete the project in his lifetime. The research center leased a floor in an office building in central London, where at peak production 50 architects, 80 engineers and 20 members of the center’s staff worked together. The engineers crunched numbers as everyone produced thousands of drawings.

“Decisions were made very quickly,” Kang said. “We’d generate a system and give the design to engineers to simulate wind flows and sun penetration in many feedback iterations. The design was shaped as much by the environment as by the basic will of the designer.”

The King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center was conceived as a legacy project for the king, but, sadly, it proved to be a double legacy, the king’s and Hadid’s. If the building achieves the stature Abdullah wanted, it was not just another trophy in Hadid’s gallery of triumphs. Always open to change, she had moved on from her successes into new territories. In Riyadh, already in her 60s, she changed direction, becoming an architect she had never quite been, creating a design she had never done. Architectural beauty and sustainability were not mutually exclusive. Like her building, she adapted.