All Eyes on AlUla
On Friday 14 February, in the gallery space of the École nationale d’architecture Paris-Malaquais on rue Jacques Callot, the AlUla Studio exhibition was inaugurated by Villa Hegra, one of the cultural entities born of the diplomatic partnership between France and Saudi Arabia. Invited by curator Meriem Chabani, AA gives us her impressions of the visit.
Clémentine Roland, Anastasia de Villepin
A lot has been happening in AlUla, a 22,561 sq.m oasis located in the province of Medina, north-west of the Arabian Peninsula. The result of an intergovernmental agreement between France and Saudi Arabia, the ‘French Agency for the Development of AlUla’ (Afalula) has been working since 2018 to develop both cultural and tourist projects, with the help of leading figures from the French architectural and artistic world. And the idea turns out to be successful: specialised magazines and the mainstream press – including AA (see AA No.446, Architecture Goes Wild, December 2021-January 2022) – are on the lookout for architectural projects in AlUla – mainly large-scale ones in the north of the oasis.
What is probably less known is the town of the same name located in the heart of the oasis, a few kilometres south of the luxury hotels currently in the spotlight. Today, AlUla is home to around 50,000 inhabitants and is dealing with an intricate urban history: anewtownbuiltinthe1970sandan‘oldtown’ofearthand stone. For its first edition, the France-Saudi Arabia university exchange programme, conceived by the Villa Hegra 1, decided to gather thirty Saudi and French students from Prince Sultan University’s College of Architecture and Design, Paris-Malaquais and Paris-Val de Seine French architecture schools to work in these urban meanders. Last February, an exhibition held in Paris, AlUla Studio, featured the works resulting from those six months of exchanges and the two weeks spent on site. ‘The students formed five Franco-Saudi teams to come up with projects that were not just architectural responses, but also urban ones,’ explains French architect and lecturer at Paris-Malaquais Meriem Chabani, who assisted the programme and curated the AlUla Studio exhibition. ‘In this new city shaped by petro-urbanism, the construction of a building can help to rethink public space. These projects on the whole encourage the transition from a city designed for cars to one designed for people.’
Far from the ‘ego trip’ that may sometimes characterise the so-called ‘starchitects’, these student projects reveal a precise understanding of the site, free from any dogma or utopian rhetoric. ‘Unlike Qatar or the Emirates, Saudi Arabia is a vast country whose inhabitants are living very different lifestyles,’ says Meriem Chabani. ‘The students drew on conversations with not only Saudi citizens but also foreign workers living in AlUla, operating in the surrounding construction sites.’ Contrary to popular perceptions that the West may have of architectural and urban choices in the Arab world – whether consciously or not, keeping some of its own mistakes under wraps – these student projects were a reminder that the oasis is first and foremost a relevant site, like any other.
Notes
1. Like the other French ‘Villas’ abroad such as Villa Médicis (Italy), Villa Kujoyama (Japan), Villa Albertine (United States) and Casa de Velázquez (Spain), Villa Hegra is a cultural institution based on residency programmes
AlUla Studio Until 28 February 2025 Galerie d’architecture Paris-Malaquais 1 rue Jacques Callot, 75006 Paris
