French architect Jean Nouvel unveiled his design for Sharaan, a new resort hidden within the rock dwellings of Al-Ula, a cultural oasis in north-west Saudi Arabia.
New designs in the form of the artist’s renderings show a resort that blends luxury accommodations with rock and stone structures into which they are built. In so doing, Nouvel’s designs respect and highlight the natural landscape, while providing modern amenities and finishes.
“We need to find the sky…this is a very important dimension for me,” Nouvel told architecturaldigest.com.
Archdaily.com shared Nouvel’s renderings in a post, describing the new resort as “a modern take on millennia-old ways of living…the concept takes a curatorial approach bringing together landscape and history.”
Architecturaldigest.com interviewed the Pritzker Prize-winning architect this week after he unveiled his designs, noting that upon full completion in 2024, Sharaan will have 40 rooms, three villas, and 14 pavilions sprawling an area of over a million square feet. It is an ode to Nabatean design and to the sandstone rock sculptures of the Sharaan Nature Reserve, considered millions of years old.
“I have a lot of admiration for the desert,” says Jean Nouvel. “The desert, for me, is a totally metaphysical dimension, surely a poetic dimension. We vanish in the middle of it, are alone in the middle of its vastness.”
“We simply elevated the motifs we found: the rock is profound. We wanted to create a total harmony with the surroundings,” Nouvel told architecturaldigest.com.
Architecturaldigest.com noted that the design is “reminiscent of the principles of Frank Lloyd Wright, who once said, ‘Nature is God of the architect,’ Nouvel’s vision seeks for the architecture to disappear within its surroundings, taking into account every crevice, dip, and curve of the rock to find the most suitable expression for various structural aspects.”
“The architectural motifs should not look like an attempt, but be enriched by the things already there, and not do any things that are not part of the natural rock motif,” Nouvel said in the interview. “If you’re making a window, for example, you need to see what the reason is for that space. It’s a very precise, very subtle vocabulary, and a play on what exists and what will exist, because there will be some things that are constructed.”
