When the City of Earth Glows: At-Turaif's Illumination and Diriyah's New-Media Art Hub

North-west of Riyadh, on the lip of Wadi Hanifah, there is a city that kindles gold as the sun goes down. Not stone, not steel, not glass. Mud brick — walls of earth packed into moulds and dried in the sun — rising out of the darkened floor of the valley as though lit from within. Come closer and the light sources are nowhere to be seen. Fixtures embedded somewhere in the walls, or hidden in the shadow of the eaves, lick softly at a surface three hundred years old. At-Turaif: the World Heritage ruin that was once the capital of the first Saudi state.

What this journal ordinarily handles is the luminous screen — the urban screen where LEDs stand in ranks, pixels flicker, and scan lines push an image out. But the walls of this city hold not a single pixel. And yet At-Turaif at night rises unmistakably out of the desert dark as one enormous image. The walls are not emitting light; they borrow light and become an image. What sort of screen culture the cities of the Middle East are assembling out of sand and earth and light — it is for that question that we set this city of earth down here. With the same gaze that read Dubai's calligraphic facade as a screen of architecture that does not glow.

Making a Canvas of the Ruin

At-Turaif began in the 15th century as a settlement of Diriyah and became, in the 18th, the political centre of the first Saudi state (founded 1727). At its heart stood Salwa Palace, the residence of the ruling family, ringed by caravan routes and residential quarters, mosques and defensive walls. What was used was the traditional architecture of the Najd region — mud-brick construction taking the clay of the wadi as its material, ornamented with geometric ventilation openings and crenellated parapets. After the city was destroyed in 1818, this city of earth was left in the desert as a ruin for a long time. In 2010, At-Turaif was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as Saudi Arabia's first cultural property.

A little over a decade after inscription, the ruin was placed at the centre of a national redevelopment called Diriyah Gate. Running it is Diriyah Company (formerly DGDA). It is one of several vast cultural developments proceeding under Vision 2030, the national reform programme Saudi Arabia set out in 2016. The restored remains have been opened to the public alongside an adjacent quarter of restaurants and cultural venues, and at night the lighting comes on.

That night-time lighting was designed by Speirs Major Light Architecture (SMLA), a practice specialising in the architecture of light. What they chose for the city of earth was not to light it brightly. Working with some 3,200 Martin Professional fixtures, they hid nearly all of those sources in the shadows and niches of the walls, camouflaging the equipment behind shields colour-matched to the buildings. Where a fixture could not avoid being exposed, they chose lantern forms that reference the tradition of Najd architecture. It is thoroughgoing restraint, in the service of not breaking the visual unity of the fragile mud brick.

The colour, arrived at through repeated trials, settled on gold: a colour temperature at which walls of earth appear to "glow beautifully and naturally". It was a choice made to summon back the memory of the lanterns that would once have lit these streets — in SMLA's words, of "flickering torch light".

a palette of differing light intensities to create a richly interwoven tapestry of layers and zones

— Speirs Major Light Architecturesource

To weave together light of differing intensities and make a fabric of many layers and zones — that is to use lighting not as a technique for illuminating a surface evenly, but as a technique for drawing an image by apportioning dark and bright. At-Turaif at night does not build its image by adding light. It turns the city of earth into a picture by subtraction: by where it lights and where it leaves the darkness alone. And on the night of a full moon, the light around the perimeter shifts to blue. In step with the lunar cycle of the Islamic calendar, once a month, the colour of the whole city changes. A wall that rewrites its image in synchrony with the motion of a celestial body — here is a screen updated not by an electrical signal but by a calendar.

Seven Trillion Pixels Cast onto a Wall of Earth

The point at which At-Turaif reached its greatest scale as a "surface that carries an image" came before this permanent lighting: a one-off event across 2019 and 2020. The Los Angeles video studio XiteLabs, working with Executive Visions (EVI), projected onto the walls of this ancient city a piece of projection mapping of record-breaking size.

The numbers exceed the common sense of the contemporary urban screen. The projection surface measured roughly 305 metres wide and 24 metres high. More than 200 laser projectors were mustered; some 226 million pixels per frame, around 7 billion pixels per second, and across the show as a whole roughly 8 trillion pixels flowed over the walls of earth. More than fifty artists and technicians spent ten months in production, and the imagery unfolded the history of Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Peninsula. The centrepiece of the staging was a giant falcon puppet some 15 metres long, worked by 24 performers. Infrared tracking let the projection follow its movements in real time, and a bird clothed in wings of light danced above the city of earth.

A one-off commercial spectacle, and a restrained permanent lighting scheme running every night. The two are opposite approaches to the same wall. The projection used up the surface of the city of earth as a giant canvas for showing "something else"; the material of the wall and its history alike become a ground for receiving video. SMLA's lighting, by contrast, puts the wall itself in the leading role and lets the light withdraw behind it. The former adds an image on top of the wall; the latter subtracts darkness from it. At-Turaif is a rare case in which these two methods were tried in the same place. And the running of the site has shifted its centre of gravity from the one-off projection towards the permanent lighting of every night.

A Vessel for Digital Art, Built in the Desert

Alongside the attempt to turn a city of earth into an image of light, Diriyah has gained one more "screen node", of a different character: Diriyah Art Futures (DAF), which opened in November 2024.

DAF claims to be the first institution in the Middle East and North Africa founded specifically for new-media art. It is operated by the Saudi Museums Commission and Diriyah Company. The design is by the Rome-based architecture practice Schiattarella Associati, and the gross floor area runs to roughly 12,000 square metres. Inside are not only exhibition spaces but a digital lab, production studios, living quarters for residencies, a library and an auditorium. Not a museum simply for "showing" work, but a facility with the equipment for work to be "made" built into it — it is positioned as the first museum in the Gulf designed for digital art.

The exhibition that marked the opening was "Art Must Be Artificial: Perspectives of AI in the Visual Arts". Curated by Jérôme Neutres, it ranged more than thirty figures side by side, from the pioneers of computer art to artists working now. Frieder Nake and Vera Molnár, who built the history of generative art; Refik Anadol, who sculpts data (an artist also touched on in the piece on data facades); and the Saudi artists Lulwa Al-Homoud and Muhannad Shono — under the subject of generation, the lineage of drawing by machine gathered in one place.

What sets DAF apart from a mere exhibition venue is that it has the circuits of training and production built into it. An emerging-artist programme run in partnership with Le Fresnoy, the French national studio of contemporary arts, gives young artists equipment, mentorship and funding, and has them make multidisciplinary work over the course of a year. The invitation-only Mazra’ah media-art residency brings established artists and researchers to Diriyah for several months at a time, on the subject of the relations between nature, technology and society. Not importing works and lining them up, but raising artists in the middle of the desert and building an apparatus that generates work — in a different sense from the ring in Dubai, which programmed "the future" without holding a collection, this architecture too takes as its subject something that does not yet exist.

A Screen That Does Not Glow, and Ma

Set At-Turaif at night beside DAF, and the question of what a screen is gets pushed open from two directions.

On one side, a wall with no pixels that does not glow: a surface of earth three hundred years old that turns, every night, into a single image by way of hidden light and the cycle of a calendar. On the other, the first architecture in the Gulf built for digital art, a building for making pixels: the computation of generative art runs in the production rooms of a residency and lands on the screens of the exhibition hall. A ruin of earth and a state-of-the-art media-art hub. The two coexist on the lip of the same wadi, a few hundred metres apart.

What is at work here is the logic of ma, the interval. What SMLA did to the city of earth was not to add light but to leave the darkness carefully in place. By designing where not to light, an image rises. What DAF built in the desert is not a display case for finished works but a blank for works not yet made — the lab, the studio and the residence, a margin still to be filled. The unlit place makes the image; the emptied facility draws production in. Ma, which produces meaning by opening space, runs through both the side of light and the side of the institution.

It should not, of course, be overlooked that this whole district sits within the context of a national strategy called Vision 2030. The lighting of a ruin, a record-breaking projection, a new hub for digital art — each is part of a cultural development led by the state. National branding and the infrastructure of art overlap here inseparably. But even granting that overlap, the restraint of a design that hides its light sources so as not to damage fragile walls of earth, and the existence of a production circuit that raises artists, deserve to be recorded at a level other than the flashiness of spectacle.

In a desert valley, a city of gold-lit earth is kindled. A few hundred metres away, a vessel for digital images not yet born waits out the night. As the tenkei of an ink-wash painting gives the landscape its bearings and its hour, these two lights set points of meaning at the edge of a desert where there was nothing. A ruin that does not glow, and a future that does. It is the darkness between them that lets this place hold as a single image.

Sources

1. fig.001At-Turaif District in ad-Dir'iyah (Saudi Arabia) — UNESCO
2. [2]At-Turaif District in ad-Dir'iyah — UNESCO World Heritage Centre
3. fig.002Diriyah Art Futures — Schiattarella Associati
4. [4]At-Turaif District in ad-Dir'iyah: A Masterpiece of Historical Illumination — Martin Professional (Speirs Major Light Architecture)
5. [5]Ancient mudbrick courtyards, streets and forms in At-Turaif unfold in soft gold light — STIR
6. [6]Diriyah 3D Projection Mapping produced by XiteLabs
7. [7]Diriyah Art Futures — official site (Ministry of Culture / Museums Commission)
8. [8]Diriyah Art Futures, MENA Region’s First Hub for New Media Arts, Opens to the Public — ARTnews
9. [9]Diriyah Art Futures Contemporary Art Hub / Schiattarella Associati — ArchDaily
10. [10]Opening of Diriyah Art Futures — e-flux Announcements

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Diriyah Company (formerly DGDA) and the Saudi Museums Commission (Ministry of Culture)

LOCATION

Diriyah

MODEL

Museum commission — A Vision 2030 cultural development by the state developer Diriyah Company; At-Turaif’s permanent lighting by Speirs Major Light Architecture, the 2019–2020 record projection by XiteLabs + Executive Visions; DAF operated by the Saudi Museums Commission with residencies run in partnership with Le Fresnoy

ARTIST PAY

DAF provides equipment, mentorship and funding via its Le Fresnoy-linked emerging-artist programme and hosts invited artists through the Mazra’ah residency; individual commission fees are undisclosed

CADENCE

At-Turaif is lit nightly, shifting to blue on full moons; DAF is permanent and open year-round; the record projection was a 2019–2020 special event

SPEC

At-Turaif lighting: c. 3,200 Martin Professional fixtures; projection: c. 305 m wide × 24 m tall with 200+ laser projectors; DAF: c. 12,000 m² gross floor area (Schiattarella Associati)

SINCE

2024

STATUS

Active

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