Ariel André-GOLEM Turns the Diriyah Biennale Foundation's Public Programs Building into a Pastel Civic Living Room

Biennales usually live in bursts: a few months of crowds, then empty halls. The Diriyah Biennale Foundation wanted something steadier, a place where its workshops, panels and public gatherings could run all year. For that brief, Ariel André-GOLEM has delivered the Public Programs Building in Diriyah, Saudi Arabia: 630 m² of interior and 330 m² of exterior space. It reads less like an institution and more like a very large, very well-organized living room.

The interest is not in a sculptural shell. The building's exterior is quiet, almost withheld. The design energy goes into furniture, color and soft surfaces. Sinuous sofas, mint tables on cylindrical legs, blue velvet climbing walls and modular classroom tables carry the architecture's argument. The space claims that a cultural foundation's most public face can be a room where you sit down, stay a while and let your children climb the walls.

A Translucent Front and a Single Palm

From the street, the building presents a long translucent skin punctured by framed openings. There is no grand portico. The entrance is marked by a circular paved forecourt and one tall palm trunk. It is a modest gesture, but an effective one: the palm acts as a landmark and a meeting point, and it signals that the outdoor area is meant to be occupied.

The mint green porch canopy and curved plinth make that intention explicit. Men sit at folding tables on the terrace in daylight, and at dusk the facade glows softly toward an empty road. The translucency does real civic work here. It lets the building announce activity without exposing it, which suits a context where privacy and openness need to be negotiated rather than assumed.

Shelving as Architecture

Shelving does most of the spatial structuring inside. Pale walls of cabinets, olive display units for art books and an orange rolling ladder define the bookshop and library zones. They act as enclosure rather than as fixtures pushed against walls. When pivot glass doors open onto the shop, the shelving becomes the backdrop you walk into, not a retail counter you approach.

The interior glazing is a sharp detail. A window from the book area looks straight into a workshop room with yellow tables, so a visitor browsing titles can see a class in progress. The curving mint desk, with its stubby cylindrical legs, softens the staff position into something closer to a host's table. These are small decisions, but together they lower the threshold of an arts institution in a way a lobby rarely does.

The Looping Sofa as Public Space

The defining object of the project is a long, looping upholstered sofa in grey and sage. It snakes through the reading hall, curls around a round carpet and faces shelving and a screen announcing the public programs. It is furniture scaled like landscape. Adults read on it, children treat it as a playground, and panels can gather in front of it without anyone rearranging chairs.

We think this is the smartest move in the building. A single continuous seat does not tell people how to sit or with whom. It allows strangers to share a surface at a comfortable distance and lets families spread out. For a foundation trying to build a year-round audience, the sofa works as social infrastructure more than decoration.

Café Walls and Gathering Tables

The café commits fully to color: pink walls, mint tables, a bench and a counter beside an open kitchen where a child and an adult sit side by side. Elsewhere, a group gathers around a round mint table under track lights, with posters pinned to a green wall. The palette is not arbitrary. Each zone gets its own hue, so the plan is legible by color as much as by walls.

Classrooms That Rearrange Themselves

The classroom is where the design becomes operational. White modular tables, birch chairs and conical pendant lamps under a skylight can be configured as a ring, an oval, a split pair or scattered islands. The four-panel sequence shows the same room working as a seminar, a workshop and a breakout space within one schedule. A mustard cabinet wall keeps materials close at hand, so changing the layout does not mean emptying the room.

Seen through a framed internal window, a seated group listens to a standing speaker. The room is visible from outside but separate from it. That layering of view and enclosure repeats throughout the building, and it suits a program of panels and talks that should feel public without becoming a spectacle.

A Children's Studio Wrapped in Velvet

The youth studio is the most tactile room in the project. Deep blue velvet and pile fabric line the walls, foam blocks and alcoves invite climbing, and stone-pattern recesses are carved into the soft surface. Below, curved white tables with yellow edges and legs hold clay, rolling pins and craft tools. Children shape clay at the tables and then climb into the wall behind them.

Treating the wall itself as play equipment is a generous choice. It removes the need for freestanding play structures and keeps the floor free for making. The carved stone-pattern recesses also hint at a regional reference without turning it into a theme-park quote.

Wet Rooms, Strip Curtains and Soft Details

The service and messy-work spaces get the same care as the front-of-house rooms. A maroon mosaic floor and sink wall sit behind a translucent plastic strip curtain, a familiar industrial device turned into a soft partition. White stools surround a glass-topped table beside a gridded wall panel, with a pink-toned room glimpsed beyond.

Up close, the upholstery shows how carefully the palette was tuned: speckled yellow blocks, grey rolled cushions and soft green bolsters resting against grid shelving with frosted panels. These are the surfaces visitors actually touch, and they explain why the building photographs as warm despite its steel and concrete tags.

Plans and Drawings

The ground floor plan shows an irregular footprint organized around a curved central counter. Meeting rooms, restrooms and an outdoor seating terrace pack around it, and the palm is drawn as a fixed point in the composition. The sections are populated with people lounging on cushions, reaching for shelves and moving up a stepped ramp in wheelchairs and with strollers. Accessibility appears as part of the story rather than as a compliance footnote.

The furniture axonometric makes the design's priorities clear. Workshop collage tables and organic youth studio tables are drawn in paired, split and ring arrangements, which shows that the project was conceived as a kit of configurations. The colored aerial axonometric reads like a board game: pink, green, blue and orange rooms around a palm, with figures scattered throughout.

Why This Project Matters

Cultural institutions in the Gulf are often judged by the drama of their shells. This building turns that expectation around. Its 960 m² are modest, its exterior is restrained, and its ambition sits almost entirely in how people are invited to occupy it. The looping sofa, the reconfigurable classroom and the velvet play wall are not finishing touches. They are the architecture, and they serve a program that needs to work on an ordinary Tuesday as well as during a biennale.

For designers working on community and cultural buildings, the lesson is practical. Furniture can carry spatial structure, color can make a plan legible, and soft surfaces can turn an institution into somewhere people choose to spend time. Ariel André-GOLEM has shown that a foundation's public programs can start long before anyone takes the stage, at the moment a visitor sits down and decides to stay.

Diriyah Biennale Foundation Public Programs Building by Ariel André-GOLEM, Diriyah, Saudi Arabia. Area: 960 m² (630 m² interior, 330 m² exterior). Completed 2026. Photography by Laurian Ghinitoiu.

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