Quartz قصر
deseRt dwelling in the empty quarter, JEDDAH | KSA
PRIVATE RESIDENCE
ONGOING
A NEW SAUDI SYPOLOGY
This residential villa serves as a weekend oasis for the client and their children’s families. The Master villa dominates the site, with guesthouse and neighbouring villas for the three siblings. It has become an un-official national typology in KSA today to enclose such residential architectures within a 4-6m high wall along the site’s perimeter, often square. In an isolated crop of desert, sterile and so devoid of features, arbitrary space emerges with the collection and stacking of program at the centre of the walled site. What inevitably emerges are spaces that are imperceptibly yet undeniably anxious and forcibly introspective.
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Our challenge was to liberate the building from the imposed limitations of a hard, static, geometric border-wall to engage he vast expanse of dynamic landscape it lives in, while fulfilling the client’s need for privacy.
Like the crystalline microscopic structures of quartz and other native desert minerals forming naturally in rocks, monumental walls in rammed-earth and white concrete jut out of the landscape into the desert air casting shade and diffusing high winds into a pleasant breeze between the avenues and courtyards they sculpt on the site. Living quarters emerge in the more private pockets of space within and between the walls. From here, the residents witness the designed heights, orientation, and arrangement of the walls through framed vistas both within and well beyond the limits of the site. Rather than the erasure of context that is characteristic of villa typology in Saudi Arabia today, the building here becomes engaged in an evolving dance with the site and elements, offering unique, horizons, silhouettes, shadows, and space from any point on site.
In addition to visually unifying the villas with geometry and materials, the architectural language of the walls enables complex, rich spaces to emerge within the landscape. In lieu of a ‘yard’ or grounds surrounding a super-villa at the centre, and extending up against the site walls, the volumes here can be pulled apart and distributed on site, communicating with one another and with landscaping walls, which invite nature to seep into and between the private courtyards and gardens of each home, connecting to communal spaces, creating experiential and massively extended promenades through tucked away, raised, shaded, bright, sheltered and breezy courtyards, terraces, gardens and lagoons.
