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.