Dinners in Riyadh
Small tables, and the conversation practices cannot have with a competitor.
Riyadh · Jeddah · The Kingdom
The architecture community in Saudi Arabia.
More is being drawn and built in Saudi Arabia right now than almost anywhere on earth, and the people doing it arrived from everywhere. BinaForm is the room where they meet each other.
A market this young does not yet have the informal networks that older ones take for granted. There is no version of the conversation practices have in London or Milan, where you already know who is good, who is slow to pay and who to call about a facade. That conversation has to be built, deliberately, and quickly.
A market with no institutional memory yet.
Diriyah is reviving mud brick construction at a scale nobody has attempted in modern times. King Salman Park is redrawing the public realm of a capital. Around them sit the projects everyone argues about and a genuine shortage of people who have built any of it before. Whatever your practice is learning on site this month, someone else is about to learn the same thing the hard way.
BinaForm exists so that knowledge moves between practices rather than dying inside them. Members meet over dinners and on site, and the directory means a member in Riyadh or Jeddah can find the consultant a member in Dubai already trusts.
What members gather for
Site visits
Inside the projects that are actually under construction, with the people building them.
The Gulf, not one city
An introduction made in Riyadh carries into Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and back again.
Questions
Is there an architecture community in Saudi Arabia?
There are professional bodies and there are conferences, but very little that is small, regular and in person. BinaForm is building that: a selective membership of architects and designers meeting through dinners, site visits and studio tours, starting in Riyadh and connected to members across the Gulf.
Who is it for in the Kingdom?
Practising architects and designers working in Saudi Arabia, whether based in Riyadh or Jeddah or flying in, and the developers and clients whose work sits beside theirs. Membership is selective and reviewed by a committee.
Where do architects in Riyadh meet now?
Mostly at the big industry events, Cityscape Global among them, which runs at the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Centre in Malham. Those are useful once a year. A standing community is what fills the other fifty weeks, which is the gap BinaForm is built for.
