Dr. Geoffrey King taught at the King Saud University in Riyadh from 1980 till 1987. He is one of the foremost experts on the art and archaeology of Arabia. In this article for Oasis Magazine he decodes the meanings behind traditional Saudi architecture.
I first saw al-Riyâd and the surrounding villages in 1972 when the
city was still small, quite unlike the sprawling mass of the capital as
it is today. Then, it was still recognizably the old mud-brick
traditional Najd settlement described by early European visitors,
surrounded by the remains of once extensive palm-groves and vast gravel
desert plains beyond. Parts of it were still recognisable as belonging
to the city that had been taken by the late King ‘Abd al-‘Azîz early one
morning in January, 1902.
The city walls of al-Riyâd that an
earlier generation of travellers had fortunately recorded had been
demolished during the 1960s but the disposition of the older part of the
city centre was still preserved, its design dictated by the alignment
of the streets, walls and spaces of the 19th century when al-Riyâd was
the capital of much of central and eastern Arabia under the Second
Sa‘ûdî state.
The first major expansion of al-Riyâd had taken
place in the 1930s as large groups of people from across Najd had been
attracted to the prosperity of the city, brought about by the peace that
prevailed after the establishment of the unified Sa‘ûdî kingdom in
1932. There was a building boom in those years with a demand for fine
mud-brick houses that made work for skilled masons, especially those
from al-Qasîm. The district where these architects from Burayda and
‘Unayza settled in al-Riyâd was still noted many years later for the
high quality of the fine carved plaster decorating the house interiors
that the Qusmân had built for themselves. The government palace opposite
the Friday Mosque in the centre of al-Riyâd was also built in
traditional manner in 1917-18 by a master-mason from Burayda for Ibn
Sa‘ûd and as late as the 1980s people still remembered the artistry
brought to al-Riyâd by the builders from al-Qasîm.
Increasing
population growth at al-Riyâd during the 1930s and 1940s led to the
building of new suburbs southwards towards Manfûha and westwards among
the palm-groves that lay towards the great Wâdî Hanîfa flood channel.
Most of the buildings of these new suburbs continued to be
constructed in traditional style using mud brick. This was as true of
the houses of the population at large as it was of the elegant new
Budi‘a guest palace built by King ‘Abd al-‘Azîz amidst the palm gardens
on the banks of the Wâdî Hanîfa in 1936-37.
Within the line of
the vanished walls of the old city, clusters of old mud brick houses
still survived into the 1970s although most of them were pulled down
during the following decade. They followed a coherent pre-modern urban
plan, complete enough in its degree of survival to comprehend how the
place had once worked socially. Narrow alleys off the side streets gave
access to the residences of extended families and to the individual
entrances to the houses of branches of the given family. These alley
ways gave privacy and security to the extended family and bridging rooms
over the street were built for the convenience of women, allowing them
to pass in privacy unveiled from neighbouring houses belonging to same
family.
The Murabba‘ palace, built by King ‘Abd al-‘Azîz in
1936-37 outside the old walls of a-Riyâd, marked the beginning of the
northwards shift of the city that has continued to the present. The
Murabba’ was the epitome of Najdî architecture and although much of it
is now lost, its grandeur of conception is preserved in a number of
photographs taken by visitors to the city over the following decade and
in the stretches of its walls that are still preserved today.
In
the streets where a diminishing stock of traditional houses survived in
the early 1970s one could still conjure the image of the appearance and
the tenor of the city in the time of Imâm Turkî b. ‘Abd Allâh and Imâm
Faysal b. Turkî, the founders of the Second Sa‘ûdî state, the al-Riyâd
that Ibn Sa‘ûd had taken in 1902 and which had grown to prosperity under
his rule. This was especially the case where whole streets of
traditional Najdî mud brick houses still stood intact behind Shari‘a
al-Thumayrî and Shari‘a Suwaylam.
These narrow streets
demonstrated how traditional housing in Najd’s harsh summer climate
provided some degree of relief from the heat of summer. By their height
they cast relatively cool shade onto the street below and the thickness
of the mud walls of the houses gave some insulation from the summer heat
and the winter cold. The design of these houses provided privacy to the
families within and made no attempt at lavish external ornament.
Rather, they had an egalitarian consistency of style, no less pleasing
by its repetition that created a coherent urban context for daily life.
Insofar as the exteriors of the buildings were decorated at all,
the “decoration” arose from a practical need to prevent erosion of the
mud brick by breaking the flow of water in the rare but violent seasonal
rain storms that are encountered in central Arabia. The effect of rain
was the down side of building in mud-brick. It was this that led to the
use of the hard plaster that covered the crenellations (shurâfâ’) of
houses to water-proof them against erosive rain flow. The same was true
of the plaster surroundings of windows. The trouble with such buildings
was that the occasional intense rains of winter and spring could be
extremely destructive. Years later I would recount to friends from Ha’il
and al-Riyâd how no-one would come to class after heavy rain if they
lived in the areas of the old town that were built of mud-brick, for the
purely practical reason that the whole family along with their
neighbours were busy shoring up their house, slapping mud back on walls
eroded out by rain.
When it was decided to restore the palaces
of the Âl Su‘ûd at al-Dir‘îyya it was quickly realised that coating the
mud walls in modern polymer-like surfacing was ineffective and even
destructive. The old traditional method of restoration using the same
mud as the houses were built with, regularly re-applied, was then the
only realistic way of maintaining such buildings. However, in recent
years, a great deal of research has been done on developing materials
based on mud that can be used to revive the architectural traditions of
central Arabia, especially by al-Turâth Foundation and supported by HRH
Amîr Sultân b. Salmân Âl Sa‘ûd. This work has shown a way to retrieve
the indigenous building traditions of central Arabia.
The
architecture of al-Riyâd was quite practical, designed to cope with the
environment within terms of the limited traditional building materials
available. The shurâfâ’, the stepped crenellations on the summits of
walls, made water-proof by hard plastering, broke the impact of rain
striking them as we have seen while a minimalist articulation of relief
string-courses did the same across wall faces. None of this was intended
as ornament although in effect it served as such: rather, it was an
entirely practical response to the periodic rains that threatened
mud-brick buildings’ survival in central Arabia.
A street off
Shari‘a al-Thumayri making a T-junction with a neighbouring street
presented a typical view in old al-Riyâd giving at the end of the street
on to a solid ochre house wall articulated only by a string course of
relief triangles to break the water flow, while the shurâfâ’ formed
stepped silhouettes against a deep blue sky. The unpaved streets in the
foreground were just as they had been when al-Riyâd was growing in its role as the country’s capital under the Second Sa‘ûdî state and under King ‘Abd al-‘Azîz.
This
traditional style of Najdî building was rapidly overtaken during the
1950s and the 1960s, supplanted by new styles of palace and villas built
in non-Najdî styles imported from abroad, largely inspired by
architecture from the modernised Islamic and Arab world of the mid-20th
C.
For all its enlargements beyond its old defensive walls over
the previous decades, al-Riyâd in 1972 was still effectively contained
within quite clear limits, bounded to the east by Wâdî Bathâ’ and the
Kuwaitî sûq beyond it and the Wâdî’l-Hanîfa to the west. However, it was
already clear that future expansions of the city would be northwards
although one could not conceive of the degree of the transformations
that were to be made in that direction by the 21st C. To the north at
that time were modern and rather pleasing areas off Shari‘a al-Wazîr
where the government ministries were concentrated along with the best
hotels, the Zahrat al-Sharq and the al-Yamâma. To the north-east was the
dormitory suburb of al-Malaz with the University and the race-track,
and beyond, Shari‘a al-Matâr, leading to the airport. All of this was
recently built. Beyond, there was nothing but empty desert stretching
away to the Dahnâ’s sands, the Eastern Province and the distant sea.
Despite
relentless modernization, one could still find distinguished
traduitional buildings in the old city in the 1970s and in areas that
seemed too run down to merit notice. One day a Yemeni shop-keeper who
knew we were interested in old buildings invited a colleague and I up
into the room above his store building that lay in a side street behind
Shari‘a al-Thumairy. We climbed from a dark ground-floor room full of
boxes of soft drinks, tea, rice and tinned food up a narrow staircase
and emerged into an elegant upper room, once the formal majlis of a fine
house. Its walls were coated with carved white plaster, sumptuously
covered in geometric and floral reliefs, elegantly designed and left
unpainted, as was generally the custom. In the corner of the room was a
qahâwî, a hearth for preparing coffee for guests. Enough light entered
through the wooden-shuttered windows to illuminate the interior without
allowing in too much heat. Vents in the upper wall allowed out the smoke
from the charcoal from the hearth. This sort of room was once found in
most if not all of the more prosperous traditional houses of the towns
scattered across Najd.
The architects and artisans who worked on
these buildings remain anonymous, although there were men who were once
well known for their skill. Talking to people in later years in
other towns in central Arabia, I encountered the names of master
craftsmen whose work was still remembered and respected, even if mud
brick building techniques and the fine plaster and wood-working
traditions had long since been abandoned.
Apart from the
articulation of the mud plaster walls, the only exterior decoration of
the traditional houses of al-Riyâd was provided by the heavy street
doors of the local ithal wood (tamarisk), a wood that lasts well and is
resistant to insects. These street doors to houses were simply decorated
with circles, discs and geometrics burned with branding irons or
painted. By contrast, the interior doors to formal reception rooms were
far more ornately treated and were painted with oil-based colours, using
floral and geometric designs.
The courtyard houses of this
older mud brick al-Riyâd had much more to do with the architecture of a
distant Arab past than the new al-Riyâd that was to be built in the
following years. The palatial courtyards of the grander houses of old
al-Riyâd were identical in plan and manner of use to a still older Arab
tradition of Islamic building for they had parallels in form to the
courtyard palaces of the Banî Umayya in Palestine, Jordan and Syria of
the 8th C. CE, like Khirbat al-Mafjar, Qasr al-Minyâ, Qastal and Qasr
al-Harana and Qasr al-Hayr al Gharbî. Whether as common houses or as
palaces, these courtyard house forms of al-Riyâd had more in common with
the buildings of early Islamic times than the villas and high-rise
blocks which marked the modernisation of al-Riyâd that was going on
around them in the latter decades of the 20th C. CE. This traditional
al-Riyâd embodied the forms and decoration that was the background of
life in an older Arabia and with so much of the past lost, it is
heartening that there is a renewed interest in the art and architecture
of the past now in Sa‘ûdî Arabia and a growing efflorescence of art in
the country more generally.
© Oasis Magazine
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