Spanning both research and design, this practice documents the layers of Saudi Arabias architectural heritage and breathes new life into historic sitesSara Alissa and Nojoud Alsudairi areshortlisted in the 2025 Moira Gemmill Prize for Emerging Architecture, part of the W Awards. Read the full announcementAmong the most beautiful installations at the 2024 Desert X AlUla biennial in north-western Saudi Arabia was a jagged cut zigzagging into the desert landscape. Invisible until you got up close, the excavated pathway sloped down into an angular, stepped gathering place before narrowing again, holding visitors within rammed-earth retaining walls. Rather than building upwards and trying to compete with the monumental landscape of AlUla, the installation allowed the subterranean contours of the earth to perform as architecture.Another subtle and poetic temporary space, built for the inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah in 2023, was made of palm reed walls. Standing on sand that was raked five times a day, the light enclosure invoked the simplicity of temporary musallas, or prayer spaces, that used to be created along pilgrimage routes. As the installations title suggests, anywhere can be a place of worship.Excavated soil was consolidated with corn starch and water, and rammed into walls to create the 110m-long and 1.5m-deep crack in the desert landscape of AlUla. The installation, called When the Earth Began to Look at Itself, was part of the 2024 Desert X AlUla biennialCredit:Lance Gerber / Courtesy of The Royal Commission for AlUlaSpare and humble yet acutely sensitive to their surroundings, these two installations incarnate Syn Architects research-driven practice. The name Syn derives from the synchronicity between collaborators and the two co-founders, Nojoud Alsudairi and Sara Alissa, who met while working on independent restoration projects Alissa with Henning Larsen and Alsudairi at the Misk Art Institute. They came together in 2015 for Shamalat, the restoration and extension of mud houses into a cultural centre in Diriyah, on the outskirts of Saudi capital Riyadh, which opened to the public in 2023. It was such a good learning exercise for us, Alsudairi remembers, noting that the process opened up questions that would become foundational to their practice. What does it mean to restore? To repurpose? What can adapative reuse look like here? It was their first time working with earthen architecture, and they were keen to introduce contemporary materials and design elements. They would go on to set up their practice in 2019. The Quran holds that man was created from sounding clay moulded from black mud, the kind that cracks and clatters as it dries. This is the beginning, and also the end to which humans will return: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Earth equally forms the basis of vernacular Najdi architecture in Saudi Arabias central plain, where Riyadh is located, typified by mudbrick structures, geometric openings and crenellated battlements. In what has now become a full-throated architectural revival, these treatments are blithely applied to facades across the capital. Suturing the future to the past in this way serves a dual purpose. For outsiders, it promotes cultural tourism as the country moves to diversify away from oil under the aegis of its Vision 2030 blueprint. For Saudis, it reintroduces modern citizenry to their heritage and cultural identity.Old earthen walls and new stone facades make up Shamalat, a new cultural centre located in Diriyah, on the outskirts of Saudi Arabias capital RiyadhCredit:Laurian GhinioiuIt was not always like this. When artist Maha Malluh purchased a pair of disused mud houses in the historic adobe town of Diriyah in 2012, earthen architecture was still associated with pre-oil-boom poverty, with having less. Malluh named the cultural centre Shamalat, after the twin peaks of an epic Jahili poem about forbidden love, and enlisted the help of her architect daughter, Alissa. The result is a cultural centre that brings together an artists residence, facilities such as a workshop, darkroom and library, as well as exhibition spaces, artisanal shops and a caf.The project unfolded in distinct restoration and addition phases, with clear material demarcations between them. Rather than replastering the entire facade, Syn kept the original and just touched up the mud plaster where it fell off, working with preservation expert Mahmoud Bendakir to understand more technical elements such as the roof. The walls of straw-bound mud brick contrast with the new volumes made of white Riyadh limestone, sourced from a nearby quarry. We try not only to understand the scale, but how the material relates to what is next to it, Alsudairi explains. The stone acts as a blank canvas, a backdrop to the earthen buildings.Syn Architects sensitive yet decidedly contemporary intervention integrates remnants of the constructions that previously occupied thesite, seen both on theoutside andthe insideCredit:Hassan Al ShattiThe work on Shamalat coincided with the governments own efforts to restore Diriyah, the ancestral home of the Al Saud dynasty. Largely abandoned in 1818 as its denizens moved to Riyadh following a bloody Ottoman siege, Diriyah was resettled in the late 20th century, with residents building new mudbrick homes, and the government began renovating its ruins in the 1990s. After the citadel of At-Turaif was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010, authorities turned their sights to developing the surrounding area into a US$63 billion giga-project under the roadmap Vision 2030, filled with Najdi-ish shopping centres, hotels, museums and other dining and entertainment venues that seek to deliver the promised Diriyah: City of Earth tagline.Alsudairi notes it is important to acknowledge the watershed societal transformations that have accompanied Vision 2030. After her undergraduate architectural engineering course at Prince Sultan University a recently launched programme she describes as a significant leap forward for womens architectural education in Saudi all her internship applications were rejected for the fact that firms did not have a then-mandated segregated space for women. Imagine how much things have changed in the past eight years. I think we take it for granted, but new leadership has revolutionised how women exist in workplaces. Were integrated, and it has really impacted our careers significantly.Within the last decade or so, much of Diriyah also became a protected site. Shamalat luckily fell just outside it the protected sites boundary wall is right across the street. Still, red tape was a major challenge. When Malluh acquired the site, permits to restore and extend a building did not exist, Alissa remembers. You would either completely demolish the existing and build anew, or carry out a meticulous restoration, faithful to the original, with no new elements. When the area changed hands to the Diriyah Gate Development Authority (DGDA), launched by royal decree in 2017 and replete with a new suite of regulations, Syn had to redo the arduous permission and design approval process they had previously completed with the local municipality. This led to a two-year delay, followed by further slowdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic.There were design impositions too. Syn were, for instance, asked to integrate a series of furjat, the small openings in this case triangular used to improve daylight and ventilation that have now become a lazy synecdoche for the Najdi style. Since the original houses did not feature them, the architects argued they did not see a value in aesthetics for aesthetics sake. The protracted battle took about a year of back and forth, but their case was heard. Instead, the pair draw from the essence of Najdi architecture in the variation of their modular but non-uniform and decidedly non-triangular openings. Each opening is indexical and frames a particular view: looking back at the original building, for example, or to the wadi (seasonal river) just a few steps away.This unconventional approach was met with resistance from the purists who romanticise adobe and who would prefer to freeze, ossify even, Diriyah in time. A lot of restoration around Saudi is for very traditional, museumified archaeological sites, Alissa explains. Shamalat was not supposed to be a pristine but unusable space, a site that would just get looked at by visitors, so functionality took precedence instead. The priority was that every part of it would get used, Alsudairi adds. Our approach is very practical inserting a floor, hiding all the ducting, electrical wiring and the central AC and its a way to keep these buildings alive.The duo is adamant that architectural heritage should not be restricted to a particular era or material, but stretch to the present and encompass the post-oil modernist movement too. In 2020, Syn launched the non-profit research project Saudi Architecture to archive and examine the countrys significant modernist buildings as well as modernist sites at threat of demolition. As designers, we tend to move on and build new projects and new districts, but there is value in documenting, maintaining and restoring the existing built environment. This is also what being an architect is, Alsudairi says. This enquiry into architectural identity finds resonance in similar initiatives across the country, including Bricklabs Saudi Modern project in Jeddah.Another research-based offshoot is the Um Slaim Collective, which Syn launched in 2021 to document fast-fading typologies of Najdi architecture in the eponymous central Riyadh neighbourhood, densely packed with still-inhabited mud houses. The aim is not to advocate revival of the vernacular, but rather its integration in the contemporary city. The architects initially had their eyes on an adobe house, but faced a moratorium on all restoration of mud houses in the area allowing developers to demolish them and profit from increased land value. They chose to rent an old cafeteria instead as a home for the Um Slaim urban research lab. Encompassing ethnography, pedagogy and art exhibitions, the lab considers traditional restoration practices as well as more contemporary and ad hoc ones such as the ongoing maintenance of mud houses by primarily low-income Pakistani tenants, which does not stem from a will to preserve, but instead to retain liveable and affordable bedspaces. Many criticise these tenants efforts, but theyre the reason why these houses are still standing, and still alive, Alissa notes. If they were left empty, they would have just decayed naturally.The duo is also interested in preserving the more intangible heritage associated with these architectures. Earthen constructions carry a lot of inherited values that are lost in contemporary practices, such as the respect of the environment theyre constructed in, explains Alsudairi. For the Saudi Pavilion exhibition at this years Venice Biennale, Syn will present the work of the Um Slaim Collective and launch the Um Slaim School, an alternative pedagogical platform to disseminate their research and grounded approach to practice. They hope it will be, like the Prince Sultan University programme for women, another leap forward for architectural education in Saudi.