Semah Alabduljabbar - سمة العبد الجبار

Semah Alabduljabbar is a Saudi Architect working at IAU, Saudi Arabia since 2018. Her interest in culture, sociology, anthropology, and the urban realm led her to focus her work on the intersection of these topics.

Upon participating collaboratively in several national and international competitions, she has placed first in the "Desert Resort Competition" held by Alama real estate Company, and second in Prince Sultan bin Salman award for Urban Heritage. Additionally, she has researched various topics in urban design and vernacular architecture.

Her year1 work at the RCA dealt with themes of preservation. She proposed active archiving ‘An active recording and documentation of existing collective activities, rituals, and customs that are threatened to disappear‘ as a tool to promote resistance to acts of erasure and displacement within sociocultural environments.

Her current work at the RCA investigates interiority within the urban realm. Specifically focusing on the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, She proposes a shadow carpet embedded within the fabric of Al Khobar city, as a response to the imposed grided urban form, challenging it to act as a stage for public engagement and inhabitation.

In making ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house - Tanizaki

The project rethinks the vernacular architectural and urban model and uses it as a tool to investigate what architecture would look like if shadow was the primary subject of thought. It attempts to reduce architecture to a few simple phenomena by unveiling shadows potential and expressive power in creating inhabitable social spaces within the semi-arid landscape of the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, its ability to conceal and flatten all social and physical hierarchies, and to emancipate its dormant capacity to demarcate the connotations and symbols. It focuses on creating a space that is defined purely by its effects and atmospheres.

It engages with a critical understanding of the urban form through its potential for interiority by looking at the Eastern province of Saudi Arabia and the recent development in its urban form caused by the economic boom that followed the discovery of oil in 1937. It situates itself within an area that is currently attempting to redefine itself using other foreign models, and investigates the urban fabric of an indifferent gridiron planned modern city planted within a flat vacuum land on the coast of the Arabian Gulf, without any local precedent to inform its planning process.

The project proposes a ‘shadow carpet’ embedded within the grid fabric of Al Khobar city in Saudi Arabia, casted by a multi-layered woven roof structure tensioned in between the surrounding buildings, as a way to challenge the potential capacity of the modern urban model to act as a stage for public inhabitation and the creation of vibrant social atmospheres.

A grided urban form

Site of intervention 'Al Khobar Al Shamaliyah, Eastern region, Saudi Arabia'

Al khobar/ Al Dhahran urban growth 1934 - 2020 – After the discovery of oil, many cities in Saudi Arabia were built following a rigid gridiron model that is highly car oriented, leaving little to no space for public inhabitation except within interior and private spaces. This formed a prominent binary between public and private and eventually depleted cities of various forms of sociality within the public domain.

Mapping the casted shadows in Souq Al Sekka, Al Qatif

Mapping the casted shadows in Ain Al Buhairiya, Al Hasa

Mapping the casted shadows in a Sabat in Al Qatif

Unlike the newly imposed model, the harsh climatic condition of the Arabian Peninsula forced a distinctive inverted type of urban formation to the vernacular towns in the eastern province. This generated an organic hierarchical tissue of public social spaces meshed in between private inhabitations. There are everyday moments within the vernacular tissue, where constructed shadow has been a distinctive material that created urban social spaces and gave the urban realm a form of intimacy.

The drawings above Document the shadow conditions that were constructed within three selected case studies in Al Qatif and Al Hasa, including Al Souq ‘The market’, Al Ain ‘The water spring’, and Al Sabat ‘The covered alley’.

Shadow conditions documented are: solid, dense, defused, dynamic shadows, and reflections from water springs.

The design is primarily based on utilizing the idea of layering and stacking different forms and shadow conditions to create an overall shadow carpet. The two categories of shadow conditions that are used to design the atmosphere, are static and dynamic shadows.

Roof plan showing overlapping layers of shadow conditions – Static shadows are mainly casted by the roof structure composed of multiple layers of woven ropes made from local palm fibre, covering the total area of approx. 80x270m. Balconies serve as a further site of intervention. Shadows that are casted though the day reach the balconies and the windows changing the lighting condition. And where buildings are lower, the roof extends to cover the building rooftops as well.

Ground plan – Larger openings are created both within a specific layer and in the areas where layers don’t overlap allowing for a larger pocket of light to emerge. Palm trees and bodies of water are placed within these larger pockets to create another layer of shadow condition which is dynamic.

The palm trees in a way mobilize the light as it casts its shadow on the ground offering a more rapid change in the diffused shadow condition. The body of water produces further reflections creating a more rapid and dynamic dialect between light and shadow. continuous benches run along the entire space and serve as thresholds of sociality. They are situated in areas where shadows are denser to allow more permanency in the activities that happen.

Each layer of fabric attaches to an architectural element on the existing buildings including facades, balconies, and stair shafts, with heights ranging from 5-20m. In doing so, the roof acts as an extension to the surrounding buildings, weaving them together and creating a tighter fabric. The roof structure covers a public square, creating a large urban living room defined purely by the various conditions it offers, its effects, beauty, and atmosphere.

The spatial language allows for an objective, impersonal territory with undefined functions, in which people could inscribe with their own meaning and diverse spatial practices, creating a form of public domesticity with the capacity to eliminate connotations and symbols.

As people would sit under the shaded area to socialize, play, eat and drink, the space develops more relevance by the virtue of shadow and a simple bench.

Where layers overlap, they create a less readable and more intricate and dense shadow condition underneath.

Within this ephemeral and ever-changing atmosphere, passing through pockets of light and shadow becomes a performance within this boundary-less space. As the shadows change and move, they lead the occupants to simultaneously shift spaces.

Eventually, Streets and voids within the city would transcend their primary functions as passageways and empty spaces, and morph into spaces for public inhabitation and engagement, due to this softly defined space that is perceived purely through a shadow cast on the ground.

The overall nature of the roof creates an uncontrolled diffused shadow condition that changes through time due to the potential deterioration of its materiality, and in direction due to the cyclical nature of shadow. The condition of the shadow is everchanging through the passage of time. The shadow would naturally stretch and compress throughout the day due to sun movement and different times of the years creating shifts in the shape and amount of light reaching the each space.

Experimentations using fibre and plaster to cast different shadow conditions and densities

Experimentations using loom weaving techniques to create a variety of shadow densities and patterns. – The woven pattern on the roof structure is designed to create shifts in shadow density, patterns and interplay between light and shadow through varying the stitch type, the tightness of the weave itself and the number of stacked layers.