Dear Grandchild,
It is Sunday night and I am awake in Saudi Arabia. This is a significant moment for me. Last week I said farewell to all of my colleagues at Zaha Hadid’s office, and today I have arrived in Riyadh for my very last act on behalf of the office. I am here for one last site visit to the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center.
This is the project that started me on my course. It was a turning point for me because it was the first project where I had the opportunity to make sustainability the explicit agenda of my design approach. The LEED Platinum certification we used for the design was my first exposure to benchmarking, and helped me to better understand the importance of measurement in communicating design intentions.
It is very difficult for me to predict what this part of the world will look like in forty years, or whenever it is that you are old enough to read these letters. In today’s world, Saudi Arabia is one of the stable anchors in a region that is torn with strife. Great wars are bringing enormous human suffering to Iraq, to Syria, and to Afghanistan. The stated reasons for the conflicts are religious ones, but there are of course deep political and economic agendas at play as well. The great wealth that comes with the petroleum reserves here in the desert heightens the intensity of it all.
As I leave behind this white, crystalline edifice in the dusty outskirts of Riyadh, I hope that I can someday bring you back here to see the building together. I imagine that its sixty thousand concrete panels will be rough and weathered by years of unyielding sun and bracing sandstorms. I hope that the prevailing winds still come from the north in the spring and the fall, and that we can stand together in one of the research centre courtyards and feel that gently cooling breeze on our faces.
Although the social ambitions of modernists like Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright are to me a great inspiration, I would not yet subscribe to their beliefs that architecture is the principle agent for curing the world of its ills. It is Louis Kahn who holds my deepest respect, and I think he might have said that architecture can open our eyes to the world and heal our souls. I still hope to play my part in making the world that welcomes you more beautiful, more just, and less violent. But perhaps this is something that I can quietly do from building to building, and from person to person, rather than imagining broad sweeping gestures of politics and economics from the top.
Thinking fondly of you from Riyadh, your grandfather. 14 December, 2014.
