Goettsch Partners (GP) is serving as the design architect for a new five-star, 900-key business hotel and serviced apartment complex in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. GP is working closely with Riyadh-based architect-of-record Omrania & Associates, as well as hospitality interior design firm David Wrenn Interiors. The client is the General Organization for Social Insurance, an agency of the state. The project is located along the Eastern Ring Road, a major thoroughfare that links King Khalid International Airport with downtown. Comprising two towers connected by a large podium, the project includes a 20-story, 650-key hotel and a 14-story, 250-unit serviced apartment building. To be operated as a Hilton property, the complex will include a variety of food and beverage outlets, two outdoor lounges, 70,000 square feet of meeting facilities, and a large, 44,100-square-foot multipurpose hall, the largest in the city. Leisure and recreational facilities include a men’s spa, health club and pool, as well as similar private facilities for women.
The project’s two towers anchor the site on the east and west, with each planned and configured as three pinwheeling legs around a central elevator core. The towers are aligned on the site to optimize views and solar shading, as well as allow for the large multipurpose hall to span the area between the structures. This connection also helps create a relationship and orientation in the tower masses that helps unify the complex.
The hotel tower has multiple two-level atriums that rotate around the elevator core, creating internal light wells and providing movement in the overall massing. Guest corridors terminate in glass facades as well, providing additional views and connections outdoors. Along with the atriums, the hotel façade is expressed with undulating reveals along the glass faces with solid, tapered end walls to frame the mass.
The apartment tower has linear slots along the intersecting three wings running the height of the tower to bring light into the core. Here, the glass façade has a weave of undulating forms that, again, bring movement to the mass and are framed by solid, tapering end walls. The roof of the multipurpose hall comprises a mixture of garden areas and terraces that connect the building to the surrounding landscape, as well as relate to the area’s overall master plan.
The project is located between the 5 million-square-foot Granada Center, one of the city’s largest shopping centers, and Granada Business Park. Other locations in close proximity include the Riyadh International Conference Center and the developing King Abdullah Financial District, a 400-acre area that will include more than 32 million square feet and feature the home of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency and the first Saudi World Trade Center.
The project will be the largest hotel in the capital and the first in Riyadh specifically designed and built for Hilton. The approximately $450 million project is currently in the final design phase and is scheduled for completion in 2013.
